


The Manor House

by Fahye



Series: Author's Favourites [7]
Category: Inception
Genre: Illustrations, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-19
Updated: 2010-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-14 14:35:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/516248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The aims of this session are twofold," Arthur lies. [fic & art collab with inknose]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Manor House

**Author's Note:**

> I am eternally grateful to [inknose](http://www.inknose.deviantart.com/) for agreeing to lend her talents in bringing some of the dreamscapes to life, working through thick and thin and computer crises. She's an extraordinarily talented artist and I'd hire her as my Architect any day.
> 
> I also owe great thanks to apiphile, who came up with the idea of personality architecture in the first place, and littledust, beta extraordinaire.

 

"Give me a year," says Dom.

"So what you mean," says Arthur, "is that you're giving _me_ a year."

Dom's near-unfamiliar laughter sounds in his ear. "I have faith in you."

"Fuck off and make mud pies," says Arthur, and hangs up.

***

"Four minutes, twenty-two seconds."

"Bollocks."

Arthur lifts the stopwatch to show him. Eames collapses into a chair and then ruins the effect by wriggling around in it until his back is at a shocking angle to the pale cream brocade. He still doesn't look comfortable.

"You forgot the stairs behind the piano room," Ariadne tells him. "Take them next time, you'll lose at least half a minute."

"I didn't forget them." Eames rubs a hand across his forehead. "I fell over halfway down them, if you must know."

"Trick step." Yusuf, sweating smugly on the settee, managed to break three minutes on his last turn. Arthur's declared him finished for the day.

"How many steps in all?" Ariadne demands of Eames.

"Seventeen. You need to give my Conan Doyle back. And are the windows on the --" He frowns and glances around. "Lost my bearings. On your left as you leave the starting point on the top floor."

"East," she says promptly.

"East side windows. Something's off about the view."

"I'm working on a boundary loop up there, that could be messing with it." She scribbles something on her notepad. "Good."

"Try the run again," Arthur cuts in.

"Patience, Arthur. Time, if you hadn't noticed, is not exactly against us. Ariadne, is there a single comfortable chair in this room?"

Ariadne, who's leaning against the wall, grins. "I thought beanbags might look out of place."

"Actually, do you know what this whole place reminds me of?" Eames says, gesturing around the room with a whirl of his hand. " _Arthur_. Look at it. It's the Victorian Country Home version of expensive ties and silver suitcases and never getting anything stuck in your teeth."

Arthur's about to pointedly ignore that when Ariadne makes an annoyed sound and walks over to slap Eames on the arm, hard.

"I don't _believe_ you," she says warmly. "Nobody was supposed to notice."

"I always notice." He winks at her. "That's my job."

"Wait," says Arthur.

Yusuf picks up an elegant brass paperweight, stares at it, and then breaks into howls of laughter.

"Wait," says Arthur again. He leans forward, elbows on knees. "This _is_ me?"

Ariadne nods. She's blushing but otherwise doesn't look ruffled. "The whole point of this exercise is to give us intimate knowledge of a few stock designs, right, and I thought -- it'd help if I made them representative. Of us."

Arthur looks around at the high, high windows stretching nearly to the high, high ceiling; the rich unpatterned carpet; the gilt edges and the glossy reinforced wood of everything. He feels at home here. He feels as though he could dream himself into the fabric of the place and weaponise it.

"Who else have you done?" he says.

~

Arthur's hands are on either side of a lectern, and the auditorium stretches upwards in front of him. He's wearing the same clothes he went to sleep in, except that when he looks down he can see that his tie is a dreadful green.

"Speech!" Ariadne calls. She, Yusuf and Eames are slouched in the front row.

"Tough crowd," Arthur says.

She twists around in her seat; the projections in the other rows do look decidedly inattentive. Three attractive young women in headscarves are whispering together and one of them is casting him amused glances as she taps a pen against her cheek. Arthur suppresses the horrifying urge to ask them if they'd like to share the fun with the whole class.

"This isn't my design. Why do I get the teaching post?" He glances at the sheet of paper lying on the lectern. It says: _Intermediate Inception 201._

"Because we respect you, O Beloved Tutor." Yusuf smirks.

Eames lifts a paper plane and sails it, with great care, at Arthur's head.

"Welcome to the University of Yusuf," Ariadne says, getting to her feet. "Wait until you see the library."

The campus isn't like any university that Arthur knows, and he wonders where the largely Paris-raised Ariadne found her building-blocks; movies of sun-drenched American college life, perhaps. Every building looks abducted from a different aesthetic, jumbled together and joined by inefficient paths and trees in fall colours. The paths are swept clear, impeccably neat, but red leaves are scattered all over the grass. Arthur can see a couple of projections lying in a huge pile of them, arms linked, staring at the clouds.

"It's very usable once you've learned it," Ariadne says. "I made sure the layout is dense, but illogical, so it'd be easy to lose a tail or confuse the subject's projections."

Yusuf is walking backwards in front of them, looking a lot happier than Arthur would if _his_ personality had been represented as such a mess. Which is, he supposes, the point.

"What are they?"

Ariadne follows Yusuf's pointing hand to a row of three buildings almost entirely covered in tesselated tiles: one in black and white, one in a multitude of shades of green, and one in a spiralling pattern of purples and pinks. White smoke twists out of thin chimneys set at every corner.

"Science labs," Ariadne says. "What else?"

Yusuf's eyes linger longingly on the bizarre labs, but he keeps walking; there's a lot to see. Ariadne directs a few turns off to the right or left, and five minutes later the path under their feet widens until it's swallowed by a paved forecourt. A Cubist-looking fountain is set directly in front of them, with tiny rainbows shimmering and dancing in its spray, and behind that -- the library. They pause in stilted unison, taking it in.

"Oh, now," Eames says. "That's really something."

The building is sprawling and strange, dark stone giving way to reflective windows tucked under exaggerated eaves, and set up high are two large cupolas with stained glass on every side. It looks like the mutant offspring of a church and a castle, given a few swift coats of paint with the brush of the twenty-first century. It doesn't look like anything that Arthur's ever seen.

Ariadne gives a little hop before she leads them inside, casting quick glances from face to face like a proud parent waiting for someone to tell her that the baby has her eyes. The main reading room has yet more stained glass, set as a feature above staircases that form a jagged X on the far wall, an octagonal clock at their centre.

Eames heads for the nearest shelf and runs his hand across the spines of the books. "You haven't gone down to this level of detail, surely."

"Honestly, I don't know what'd be in them. The details are up to the subject." She looks at Yusuf.

"I highly doubt I have the words of an entire book, even in my subconscious memory," he says, and takes one from the shelf. Everyone else does the same.

Arthur opens his to a random page: _lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisci velit…_

"No real content in this one." But even as he says it he isn't sure.

"This one's just photographs." Ariadne.

"I've got a poem," Eames says gleefully, and leaps away from Yusuf's grab, up onto a chair. The projections reading nearby give them the universal dirty looks directed at library noise-makers.

"We’re going to get kicked out," Ariadne mutters.

" _Yes, we are going to suffer, now; the sky_  
Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real;  
The groping searchlights suddenly reveal  
The little natures that will make us cry,

 _Who never quite believed they could exist,_  
Not where we were. They take us by surprise  
Like ugly long-forgotten memories,  
And like a conscience all the guns resist."

Eames has a good voice for poetry; not even the projections complain into the hush that falls when he pauses. His finger skims down the page, flicks it over, and then he quirks a very small smile. "Ah."

"What, did you think I wrote it myself?" Yusuf claps his own book closed and points the spine at Eames. "Him next."

~

The noise is a shock, and Arthur has turned around to yell something into Ariadne's ear before he realises that she's not there. The girl standing next to him is even shorter than Ariadne, with a black ponytail spilling down one shoulder and a feather-edged mask in peacock colours. Her eyes sparkle up at Arthur and when she turns to melt into the crowd, her hips sway in time to the music. Arthur tries to catch the melody over the cacophany of voices, the middle-distance slosh of water against brick, but it's difficult, and definitely unfamiliar.

Someone jostles up against Arthur's side. "Well, the mask is new, but I'd know those trousers anywhere."

"Your subconscious is flirting with me."

"You could at least try to sound shocked." Eames looks around. His mask, somewhat to Arthur's surprise, is a plain theatrical white. Blank. "What do you think? I like it."

Arthur's only ever been to Venice during the winter floods, when the water in Piazza San Marco would have come up to his knees it it hadn't been for the planking set above the waterline, and his clearest memory is of following Mal from shop to shop on Murano and listening to her laugh as Dom held glass jewellery up to her ears and fastened it around her neck. He's never seen the Carnevale, and nobody around them is speaking anything but English, but the base design is obvious nevertheless.

"It's more chaotic than the others."

"That's hardly an answer."

"It was a loaded question." Arthur smiles and reaches up to feel his own mask. It feels like leather and covers his entire face. When he unties the ribbon and lifts it off he can see that it's a dark red colour, carefully moulded, the features set in a creased and perplexed expression.

"Arthur!" It's Yusuf's voice. Arthur turns around and sees the edges of the man's hair peeking out from under a tricorn hat. Yusuf has ditched his own mask already, if he was wearing one.

"Now all we need is the hostess herself," Eames says. "Well, Columbine?"

Ariadne turns around in a rustle of fabric and lowers her own half-mask, which is elaborately decorated in gold and supported by a stick. Beneath it her face is made up, her lips vivid and eyes dark.

"I would _not_ have seen you there," says Yusuf.

She gestures around with her mask. "Okay, so it’s a bit obvious."

"Which makes it even more appropriate," Arthur says before he can stop himself.

"What's the matter, Arthur?" Eames looks straight at him. "Jealous that your personality isn't as colourful?"

Which is unfair, because Arthur has only been making the comparison with a tiny bitter part of his mind -- barely acknowledged -- wondering meanly if all Ariadne sees when she looks at _him_ are prim angles and cold hallways. So it just figures, it's just his fucking luck, that Eames can stand there and make jokes that rush to the heart of his insecurity. Pinning him like an insect.

Arthur's always been a fast learner but he still has to check himself, sometimes, keep quiet and make sure the rules he's following are the right ones, and the fact that Eames understands people so effortlessly makes him furious, _furious_ , white-hot with a surge of it like electric current from his rubber soles to the top of his head, and he channels that deliberately into the way he kneels down there on the cobbled street and rolls his die. Every muscle held with the right amount of tension. The flick of his wrist. Standing in one fluid motion instead of seven small ones.

Ariadne looks almost worried, as he brushes the dirt from his knees, but she turns away and doesn't comment. Totems are private business.

~

~

"Mr Eames, would you like to tell the class the difference between precision and accuracy?"

Eames looks over his shoulder, not bothering to lower the gun. "Why do I get the feeling this is a maths question?"

"Perhaps if you'd paid more attention in school…"

"Perhaps if you weren't a patronising _arse_ ," Eames says, landing on the word with relish.

Yusuf looks at Ariadne. "You know, we could leave, and come back when they've fucked it out."

Ariadne says, "What do you mean, _leave_?"

Arthur feels that the light arms lesson is getting the tiniest bit out of hand. "Accuracy is how close to the target you are. Precision is how consistently you hit the same spot."

"Really," Eames murmurs, his mouth curling at the side. "Fascinating," which means he already knew the answer and is screwing with Arthur to amuse himself.

"Precision without accuracy reveals a systematic flaw in your technique. Accuracy without precision means you need more practice. The targets will give us information on both."

This is a very simple dreamscape, utilitarian and confined; any attempt to leave the firing range simply walks you in again by the opposite door. Ariadne is almost succeeding in her attempt to look nonchalant and unexcited about the fact that she's holding a gun. Yusuf just looks bored. Arthur leans back in his chair, one ankle balanced on the knee of the other leg, and draws up some tables in his notebook.

"All right, let's see what you can do."

The myriad clicks and retorts of weaponry are their own language, intimate and long-remembered. Arthur taps his pen against the paper and keeps his face blank as he calls up the ache in his knees from holding positions, the stiffness in his fingers from afternoons spent training himself into speed and deft disassembly.

It's helpful to know your strengths so you can dream up your favourite arsenal instead of one that you don't know how to use, but the real object here is automaticity: when it comes to a job, you either stop the projections or you don't. You either kill your teammates with a single shot, or you don't. Arthur's had his jaw blown away by a mangled kick attempt and has no plans to repeat the experience.

"This is the best tutorial I've ever had," Ariadne says. "Now what?"

Arthur hands her a .40 Smith & Wesson. "Now this one."

An electronic system connected to the targets sends Arthur the data, which he enters into his own tables. Ariadne is a reasonable beginner, all over the place but not showing any particular bias. Arthur doesn't tell her to practice on her own time; he can tell by the look in her eyes that she's already memorising the details of the range's design. Yusuf is fine with revolvers but tends a little to the left with automatics. Eames steals Arthur's notebook and writes in his own results, with commentary.

"I apologise, Arthur, it seems I am at _least_ three percent useless."

Arthur lets his mouth quirk. "We'll have to work on that."

"How much more of our time are you planning to waste today?"

Arthur looks at his watch. "Five minutes down here."

"Excuse me for this," Eames says, all politeness; spins on his heel, and shoots Yusuf through the head. The man's body teeters back and then crashes to the ground in the way that bodies do. Eames turns the gun around in his hand and offers it to Ariadne. "May as well get used to it."

"Eames," Arthur says sharply.

"I hesitated, my first time," Eames says, ignoring him. "It didn't ruin anything, but it might have."

She takes the gun. Checks the chamber and the safety in exactly the way that Arthur showed her. "It's a good point," she says. "Thank you."

Arthur barely has time to inhale before the barrel kisses his forehead, there's an incredible noise, and he wakes up.

~

For a while Ariadne won't even admit that she's designed an environment based on her own self, which Arthur understands; letting them in would be like giving them her diary to read. When she agrees to show them, Arthur wonders how much street-cleaning she's done, if like an Olympic host city she's anxious to show off only the best aspects of herself.

But perhaps that's an unfair thought in itself.

"Dress code?" Eames asks, settling himself in the chair.

"Patience, Mr Eames," Ariadne says, and Arthur only realises that she's mimicking _him_ when Eames laughs. "I'm sure I can provide you with something suitable," she adds, and reaches out to press the button.

Ariadne must be missing the summer, because there's barely any cloud cover, and the sun beats down in heavy-palmed rhythms on the garden. Arthur goes to shrug off his jacket before he realises that he isn't wearing one. His sleeves are rolled up as though ironed into place, his top two buttons undone, and his pants are very light wool.

"You couldn't dream me a pair of jeans?"

Ariadne raises herself on one elbow and slides her sunglasses down her nose, Lolita-like. "Do you own any jeans?"

He has to think about it for long enough that she smiles, pushes the glasses back up, and leaps to her feet. This is the first time he's seen her arms entirely bare, he realises. She's wearing a red singlet top and khaki shorts that brush the top of her knees, comfortable, almost wild, with her hair loose and bare feet buried in a fitful crop of buttery dandelions amidst the grass.

"Not a city?"

"You don't know everything about me," she says, but she doesn't look offended. "Come on. The gazebo's not far from here."

Arthur catalogues as they walk, locking down the aesthetic of the place; sure, it's not a city, but it's also too landscaped to be pastoral. In the dense shade of a pergola they're overtaken by a couple of projections on bicycles, who have disappeared by the time they emerge blinking at the base of a small hill. The gazebo on top has a three-tiered roof and stands out, shocking bone white, against the grass and trees. Yusuf is leaning against the railing; he lifts a hand when he sees them and jogs down the hill.

Ariadne looks around. "I thought Eames would be here."

"How big is this place?" Arthur asks.

Her mouth thins in concentration. "Pretty big. Let's try the parterre." The French _r_ catches easily on the back of her tongue.

Arthur scratches uselessly at the back of his neck, aware of an itch there that's got nothing to do with his body. It doesn't feel like danger, quite, and they're not attracting any hostility, but it's a steady sensation. He kicks his alertness up a notch.

Eames is kicking up gravel in the parterre, mingling with projections, tracing out the loose knot of the path between the low hedges and stone-edged gardens. As they're approaching he shifts into a good replica of one of the nearby projections, a girl with long legs and cornrows carrying on a conversation in exuberant sign language. For a few seconds his hands echo her gestures with growing confidence, and then he's Eames again, conjuring a smile for Ariadne as she abandons the path and tramps through a flowerbed packed with tulips to greet him.

"I was about to start looking for the croquet lawn," Eames says.

"I'll make you one," she says, probably not joking. "But I had something else in mind for now."

Eames crushes a few more plants on his way back over, and sweeps a look down Arthur's body that's too quick and too blatant for Arthur to bother calling him on it. For some reason his gaze gets stuck on Arthur's feet, bare like everyone else's.

"Lost your shoes?"

"My face is up here," Arthur says dryly.

Eames grins. "I suppose it's a start," he says, and dodges the kick Arthur aims at his ankle.

The air hums warm and holiday-fresh around them, and the grass is never prickly, the stones never uncomfortably hot against the soles of their feet. They pass: a sculpture garden of half-ruined marble surrounded by spotless yellow roses. A Chinese moon gate set into a decorative wall, through which they glimpse the restless tendrils of a willow. A _bosquet_ \-- Ariadne gives them the French again, and Arthur blinks hard against the way the rows of citrus trees line themselves up obligingly in his line of sight no matter what angle he views them from. A collection of birdbaths made of twisting greening bronze. A grove of enormous trees bridged by walkways high above their heads, joining treehouses wedged into the generous spread of branches thicker than Ariadne herself. Arthur trails his hand against the bark and follows with his eyes the way the walkways slant up and up and up in defiance of paradox. He honestly doesn't have the language for this design; it feels technical, and yet disorganised. It feels as though if everyone went silent he'd hear the muffled papery swish of pages turning beneath his feet.

"Where's the maze?" he asks. "It'd be difficult to lose a tail here, everything's so spread out."

She shakes her head. "This one isn't for jobs. It's -- an ongoing experiment."

"Aren't we all," Yusuf says.

"Deeply profound, thank you," drawls Eames.

Yusuf shrugs and links his hands behind his neck as they walk. "That's how this place is -- you don't feel it? It's evolving in the places we cannot see."

"Right," Ariadne says. "Change is important here, it's -- it's the genius loci, you know? The spirit of a place," she explains, at Arthur's look. "One of my lecturers wouldn't shut up about it, he was all Neo-Rationalism this and Alexander Pope that, but it's a good idea. It's all about having the things you build be in keeping with their natural context. It translates well, if we're talking dreams."

"Avoids anomalies," Eames says, and she nods.

Change. That's the itch. The dream isn't constant and Arthur is tingling with the flux. He looks back the way they came and can't see the treehouses any more, even though he knows they were walking downhill and didn't turn any sharp corners. Maybe you could lose someone here after all, but you'd have to do it by losing yourself first.

"Up here." The sun is behind them; Ariadne slips off her sunglasses and points to where the grass drops off sharply, a near horizon marred only by one place where the sky spills down and gathers shimmering in a frame of grey stone.

Arthur looks again.

The illusion is breathtaking, the pool poised so perfectly and the sky such a throbbing blue that the transition is seamless. As they near the edge of it a breeze rises, just enough to set the water trembling; just enough to prove the point.

"Swim?" Ariadne suggests into the silence.

"Oh, fuck me, yes," Eames says, and stops staring at the pool as though it's a long-lost lover for just long enough to pull his shirt off. He doesn't bother with the shorts, just drops his shirt in a puddle and leaps into the water.

Arthur looks away, at Ariadne, who's pulling her hair back with both hands and twisting elastic around the mass of it with economical movements. She pauses with her hands up behind her head and catches Arthur's gaze, flashing a sun-heated smile, and Arthur has a sudden mental image, from nowhere -- _incepted_ , he thinks, insanely -- of that hair bridging the gap between her face and his own, of her body tucked in neatly against his, her legs straddling him, and Arthur's hands flat against bare skin with the gorgeous ripple of her shoulderblades moving beneath.

He holds it, blinded, for the time it takes to breathe in, and then he pushes the desire out along with the breath. The rolled-up sleeves of his shirt are snug against the inside of his elbows. He takes one step backwards from the edge of the pool as Yusuf dives in, just one step, feeling out the shift in his centre of gravity from toes to arch to heel, and then he's in control again.

Ariadne slides rather than leaps, and sighs with pleasure once she's sunk in the water up to her chin. "Coming in?"

"I will." He can almost taste the coolness of it, the relief from the heat, but he's in no hurry.

"Last chance," she says.

He raises his eyebrows. "Chance for --"

The hidden fountain gives no more than a low hiss of warning before a deluge of water-spray erupts and soaks Arthur entirely. He splutters, clears his vision, and moves out of its line of spray to be greeted by three faces shining with schadenfreude.

"You might as well," says Eames in his most insufferably reasonable voice.

Arthur closes his eyes; feels the sun on the back of his neck, the wet concrete beneath his feet, and then leaps forward in a dive that sends him gliding just below the surface. It'd be smoother if he weren't fully dressed, but it's still a good dive, bringing him up almost at the infinity edge. For a long moment all he can see is sky.

"Showoff," Ariadne says, and splashes him. He can see her red top gone the colour of old blood beneath the water, clinging to her breasts.

"A good idea, this pool," Yusuf says. "I like it more than that ditch I almost broke my ankle in -- what was that?"

"Oh, the ha-ha."

Yusuf snickers. "The what?"

"Ha-ha," Ariadne repeats, her face primly serious, and that's when the infusion runs out.

Waking through laughter into a dry unlaughing body is disconcerting, but then Yusuf says, " _Ha-ha_ ," in his deepest and most refined tone, and that sets them all off again. Even Arthur has to steady himself on the side of his chair.

"I hardly want to ask," says a familiar voice.

Eames is standing before Arthur's turned around, and shaking Saito's hand three seconds later. His voice is still warm with amusement. "We've missed your face around here, Mr Saito."

"I cannot say I missed _your_ face, Mr Eames, when you have so many for me to choose from."

Eames grins and claps his free hand around Saito's elbow. "One or two of them would be delighted if you stayed around for a while."

"Not long. The energy market in the wake of Fischer's actions is proving to be -- exciting." Saito looks around. "I admit, I thought you would have moved your base of operations."

"I've never liked the French," Yusuf sighs. "They are so difficult to bribe."

Eames smiles. "Nobody forced you to ship your entire laboratory to Paris, Yusuf."

"Please." He lifts his hands. "Someone has to keep an eye on you, Eames. And who else in the world is going to be playing at inception?"

Even Arthur now has an apartment in Paris, which he hasn't bothered to decorate. He too would have preferred somewhere else, really, but they could be based in Antarctica for all the difference their external workspace makes right now. Ariadne has a few classes to complete before graduation and Arthur suspects that Dom had a hand in convincing her to finish her degree; Arthur has trusted Dominic Cobb with his personal safety countless times, but the man's complex about _normal lives_ can be tedious on occasion. None of the truly important events of Arthur's life have occurred while he was awake.

Nevertheless: Paris. At least the food is good.

"So, my friends," Saito says. "Why the hilarity?"

Every eye in the room turns in Ariadne's direction.

"Ariadne," Yusuf says. "Tell me you did."

She leans back in her chair, looking thoughtful, lapping it up. When the smile appears it's sudden and transforms her.

"I might have something tucked away," she says.

~

~

They're in an elevator. Arthur glances around, noting escape options out of habit, and then watches the light moving from number to number. He has to double-take at how many of them there are: three basements, fifty-seven floors. The only illuminated button on the side of the lift is the 4, and they're currently at seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen.

"Ten quid says casino hotel," says Eames. He's even more atrociously dressed than usual, so much so that Arthur wonders briefly if he's a projection.

Yusuf makes a scornful sound. "Offices."

The only building Arthur can associate with Saito is that which Nash designed and he himself dreamed: the lush alcoves and dense wood, the platform upon the lake, the light reflecting in Mal’s curls. Not nearly enough of a maze, in the end. He gives his right foot an absent shake as if to banish a cramp.

"Ariadne, my sweet, would you build me a casino?"

"Sure," she says, her eyes on the numbers. Nine. Eight. Seven. "It’s better to cheat a figment of the imagination -- less chance of going to jail."

"And yet somehow less satisfying," Eames says, and the elevator gives a low sound, more like a _meeb_ than a _ping_ , as gravity makes itself briefly known under their feet. Four.

The doors open to a wash of white-blue that takes a little while to arrange itself into shapes, but when it does, Arthur doesn't know where to look first.

"Oh, sweet lord," says Yusuf. "It's techno-Hogwarts."

Ariadne’s laugh bursts out of her like water. She's the first one to exit the elevator, stepping out onto the wide platform that runs all the way around the interior of the lofty atrium; the reason why they're on the fourth floor instead of the first, Arthur assumes. When he joins Ariadne at the railing he settles in to stare at the enormous tubes of glass that run up and down the wall opposite them, the floors and floors and asymmetric floors of rooms with frosted glass swirls adorning their interior walls, the square shallow impluvium on the bottom floor that captures the pale angles jutting out above it.

"Fountains and pools," he says. "You do have a thing for water features."

Ariande looks fondly down at their tiny reflections in the impluvium, which is larger than Arthur's living room.

"More space," she says, without elaboration.

A shadow passes across their images as one of the rigid moving staircases that criss-cross the atrium makes a silent arc above their heads, dotted with chattering people wearing what can only be haute couture, from what Arthur can see of their hats when he looks up.

Yusuf has his eyes on the staircases as well. "Which floors to get on?" he asks.

Ariadne's gaze blurs as she checks her inner blueprint. "The bases are at multiples of six, beginning at twelve. The number of floors they span changes periodically. Their timetable can be altered as we need it, of course, and the same goes for the elevators."

As if on cue a silver elevator slides down one of the transparent tubes and halts at the ground floor. To Arthur who spends so much of his life with his bloodstream connected to the world outside his skin it looks like nothing so much as the plunger of a giant syringe, delivering an invisible dose.

"I would like to see the view from higher up." Saito is looking around with that magnificently proprietary air that he assumes with all of them, as though mentally he's filed them away in a cabinet marked _assets_. Somehow this doesn't interfere with the impression that he genuinely likes them as people. "Thirty-six, I think."

"It _could_ be a hotel," Eames says, when they're back in the elevator. He reaches out and taps his fist against the 36 button. "I'd stay here."

"It could be offices," Ariadne says. "It's flexible."

"How do you create them?" Saito asks.

Arthur remembers asking Dom that question once. Dom had been putting away Phillipa's building blocks, and paused with a solid green archway in one hand, and Arthur had just -- wondered, from nowhere. How it feels to have these elaborate labyrinths within yourself somewhere and to tweak them into being. But he's pretty sure Saito's question was more precise than that.

"The personality architecture?" Ariadne checks, and Saito nods. She starts to shrug and then thinks better of it; Arthur likes that, likes that she's never pretended weakness in those areas where she knows herself to be strong. This isn't the industry for false modesty. "No tricks, really. I like to think about people. But I'm better with buildings, so -- if the person was a building, or an environment, how would they work? What would be important?"

"Genius loci," Arthur says, and the look she gives him is a gift, blazing and soft.

"Yes."

"Have you constructed one for Mr Cobb?" Saito asks.

Something that's too harsh to be fear, but looks a lot like it, flits over Ariadne's face.

"No." Her voice rings with finality. "No."

"They are remarkable," Saito says, tact gliding under his voice. He glances at Ariadne. "But this particular building may be not be useful in its current avant-garde state, I fear."

"Perhaps not today. Or tomorrow." She shrugs and deliberately catches Eames's eye. "But there's nothing wrong with dreaming big."

~

"I am not a field agent," Yusuf insists. "I am not here to drive your vans and be shot at again, Arthur. I am here as a chemist."

Yusuf is a difficult man to shift, once his mind is made up, and his reasons are usually sound. Nevertheless --

"I'd like everyone to be involved."

"For what purpose?" Yusuf puts down his pipette and gives Arthur a hard look. "Neatness?"

Arthur blinks. Then nods, ruefully, because he's never been _that_ proud.

"Three chairs, then. And we won't need the programmed manipulator if you're still awake."

Yusuf's grin is almost beatific in its anticipation. "You can trust me completely."

"I might have," Arthur says, "until you said that."

Eames also likes to think of himself as difficult to shift. But Arthur has known him for a long time, and knows he has other qualities which exist in direct conflict with this, one of which is his terrible inability to sit still while interesting things might be happening nearby. The trick is in letting this curiosity saturate him without ever acknowledging that this is, in fact, what you are doing. In this case that would require disclosing more details than Arthur's willing to give upfront, though, so Eames digs in his heels with a fair amount of success.

"Why do I have the feeling this is you showing off?" he says.

"It's just training," Arthur says for the third time.

"Guns, fine. Letting you kick the proverbial out of me in the name of _training_ , no. I prefer manipulating events from a safe distance, if it's all the same to you."

"Set up all three, please, Yusuf," Arthur says and walks over to stand in front of Eames. He uses two fingers to push the man in the chest, gently. "Not to be crude, but -- suck it up, Mr Eames."

Eames looks at him neutrally and then licks his lips; a taunt. He waits until Arthur's gaze has flicked down -- back up -- before he says, "Oh, well, darling, when you put it so nicely."

"Is that a yes?" Arthur presses.

Eames waves a hand in one of his indefinably British gestures, and picks up an IV kit as he goes to settle himself in the nearest chair.

"I like the new chairs," Ariadne says. She's giving the ceiling a fearless look. "Comfortable."

"No questions?"

The look transfers itself to Arthur. "Would you answer them?"

"Touché," says Eames, approving.

Hand-to-hand combat isn't Arthur's favourite either, but that's no reason not to become superb at it. The dojo he dreams them into is a small one, the walls close on either side, but Arthur can count on one hand the number of fights he's had in spacious well-lit areas with floors that grip your feet and cushion your falls.

"I really hope this is where you tell me Yusuf is going to download kung-fu into my brain," Ariadne says.

"The military hasn't worked that one out yet," Arthur says. He doesn't need to look to know that Eames is smiling at how much of that joke wasn't a joke.

"So…?"

"Watch, for now."

Her eyes dart from him to Eames. "Is that going to help?"

"We'll see," Arthur says, and she steps back.

"Right then," Eames says, and smashes his elbow into the side of Arthur's face.

Arthur doesn't fall but his head strobes with a pain that's almost audible, and he forces his eyes to stay open so that when Eames follows it up with a brutal stamp in the direction of his instep, the movement makes a dark blur against the fizz of his vision, and he pivots on the opposite foot to avoid it.

"Hm," says Eames, who talks when he fights.

Nothing from Arthur, who doesn't; Arthur whose visual field clears stepwise until he can see Ariadne lower herself to sit on the floor in his periphery. He doesn't move his focus from Eames to catch her expression.

He has to blink hard against the drift of his perspective to make sure that it isn't an illusion brought on by expectation, but no: all of the horizontals and verticals are becoming diagonals. Gravity seizes him by the elbow and suggests that he fall, and Arthur digs the sides of his feet into the carpet and refuses.

Eames says, "What the everloving hell --" and Arthur grins, barely stops himself from laughing, as he launches himself forward and lands his own hard blow on the side of Eames's head, making sure the force is in the same direction as the shift.

"Whoa!" Ariadne, sitting, isn't suffering too much; Arthur swiftly dreams her some metal loops embedded in the wall, and she grabs hold.

The dojo levels out on an odd angle, Arthur sliding towards the wall to his right at the same speed as Eames, who curses and rights himself and then falls over again. When he locks his eyes onto Arthur he looks furious, then jubilant, then breathless, then laughs and shoots out a foot to halt himself before he slams into a corner.

"We wouldn't want you to get bored, Mr Eames," Arthur says, coming to a halt within striking distance just as gravity changes its mind. Yusuf must be tilting the chairs at a terrific rate for the shifts to be happening this fast in dreamtime; Arthur will probably wake up with his neck a solid block of sore muscle.

Both of them pitch over, Arthur backwards, Eames only just keeping his feet as he stumbles forward. Arthur manages a move that sets a tendon in his left forearm screaming with sudden extension, winces as his palm scrapes across the floor, but he's on top of it. He's ready.

"You've played this game before," Eames says. "I rather think that counts as cheating." And as Arthur musters both his breath and a scathing look he grabs hold of one of Arthur's hands and then the other, crushing them and forcing him to bend, pulling him up close and holding him in place even as all the lines of the room accelerate in their rotation.

Something wild burns through Arthur and he directs it into the vector of his leg, the force applied, the perfect angle. Eames grunts through his teeth and falls, knee buckling beneath him. Arthur's knees are bending too, but deliberately, his weight seeking a solid centre. As soon as he finds it he kicks again, but Eames is recovering fast: he lets Arthur's foot glance off his shoulder and then moves into the tilt.

The ground is a sickening sidelong treadmill under Arthur's feet. Eames moves in a circus-tumble that looks awkward as hell but the momentum brings him up inside Arthur's reach, still low, tackling Arthur at the waist and forcing his feet out from under him. When Arthur hits the -- floor? yes, floor -- most of his air leaves him in an ugly gasp that sears his throat.

"Yeah!" Ariadne, limpeted to her handhold, yells out a cheer. "Go Eames!"

Arthur kicks, more blindly than he'd like, and makes contact with something firm. Two seconds later something firm makes contact with him, and his entire arm goes transiently dead. Instinct takes over from there, granting him blunt contact again and again, interrupted by the occasional bout of dizziness as gravity seizes him up and rewrites his proprioception. The constant adjustment means that it's unexpectedly exhausting, without the adrenalin that got him through the fights in the hotel, and Arthur is glad when he manages to force them to a standstill.

"Nicely -- played," Eames gets out. He's wedged between the wall and the floor with Arthur's knee on his sternum and his breath coming in surges. One hand flops to rest on Arthur's calf, a touch that's startlingly careless after the last few minutes of targeted contact, and he breathes his heart rate down with his lips parted and his eyes fixed on Arthur's face. The room constricts. Arthur doesn't look away.

It's nothing important. It's a fingernail under the edge of a scab, a mild exploration, as though to prove to themselves that the possibility is there. If Arthur wanted to summarise the difference between himself and Eames he could say -- among many other things -- that Eames is the sort of person who repeatedly uncovers his own wounds for the sheer satisfaction of peeling the scab away.

Arthur knows that things heal faster when they're covered up. He also knows that you might as well move quickly enough to avoid being wounded in the first place.

He knocks his knuckles softly against Eames's jaw, a warning, and then lifts himself off. "You're in," he calls, and struggles up the shallow incline to where Ariadne is still clinging, her hair everywhere and an impatient enthusiasm on her face.

"What, no tips?" she says.

"Don't let him hit you," Arthur suggests, and prises her left hand off the metal. She uses it to pinch the webbing of his thumb, hard, and then drops away from that wall and slides ungracefully down until she's wedged in the currently-lowest point next to Eames.

Eames tosses Arthur a we-might-have-a-talk-about-this-later kind of look, which Arthur ignores. He trusts Eames to do this right.

Ariadne says, "I'm just going to work on the assumption that I won't hurt you much no matter how hard I try."

"That's probably true," Eames agrees, and grabs hold of her leg behind the knee, then pulls hard enough that she topples over and comes down hard on a bent arm.

"Fuck _you_ ," she says, and kicks back.

Arthur loops an arm through the metal and waits out his own latest bout of queasiness, watching. He sees that both of them cope better with the tilts with every one that happens. He sees that Eames is holding back a lot, but not enough that Ariadne complains; she's obviously not stupid enough to think that he's giving her everything. He sees that Ariadne fights with no skill at all but the kind of raw, wriggling gut instinct that Arthur's only ever seen in women, the fear that becomes determination becomes limbs twisting like oiled wire and bursts of incredible strength.

He'll teach her to fight properly, but today isn't about that. Today is about the hazards that only dreamers would ever face, because if there's one thing that Arthur wishes someone had told him a long time ago, it's how easy it is to forget, when you're stressed, that the rules are different down here. Totems can't help you unless you think to use them, and they certainly can't tell your inner ear that floors are meant to be horizontal things. Even in your mind you are at the mercy of your body.

Arthur tries not to forget things. But he does. He forgets that Eames knows parts of him too well, certain paths of his personality, the ways in which he attacks problems.

So Eames dodges Ariadne's punch just slowly enough that she can see where she went wrong, and he says, "Of course, dreams can throw up things that surprise you."

Ariadne's a silent one too; or perhaps she's saving her breath. She gives him a sharp look and doesn't drop her guard waiting for elaboration, smart girl -- Eames smiles fondly and directs a vicious kick at her shin. She swears and tries to struggle away, but he's got weight and experience on his side and he pins her fast.

Eames goes on, "There's more to this than just trying to get the other person to hurt enough that they stop hurting _you_. What's the best way to stop a man in his tracks, in your experience?"

Ariadne ducks her head and looks at his crotch. Eloquently.

"Exactly," Eames says. "Men have sensitive areas. But this isn't the real world, pet, and sometimes you might be fighting someone who has the option of removing the weak spot."

"Removing?" Ariadne pants, sounding like she might laugh.

"In a manner of speaking," says Ariadne's voice out of Eames's mouth, which is the only warning they get. Even as it happens the room is tilting back to a normal angle and the two of them are rolling rolling rolling like cups set over a token and moved too fast for the eye to follow, until they come to an awkward halt side by side, hair tangled, catching their breath. A flipped coin would have just as much luck as Arthur in identifying the real girl over the forgery.

"This is so weird," one of them says. Pauses. "Pervert."

"Come on, sweetheart, where's your sense of adventure?" the other one says, and drops a loud, wet kiss on the real Ariadne's neck. Arthur bites his tongue, hard.

Ariadne knees herself in the stomach, scrambles away, and sits back on her heels with a huff. " _So_ weird," she says, but she looks obliquely pleased.

The Ariadne that's Eames lies back on the mat and closes her eyes, giggling deep in her slim girl’s throat.

~

Arthur is getting used to finding himself in the sunshine with a mask on his face, but this time he takes it off immediately. They're not here to train; or maybe they are. Ariadne was cryptic on that point.

"All right, what did you want to show us?" Eames asks.

She leads them off the street, through a blue door and up a flight of stairs. The buildings in this design aren't as detailed as the scene outside, and there's nothing memorable about the furnishings. Ariadne heads down a corridor and opens another door, and inside this room there's nothing but three plush armchairs arranged around a PASIV machine.

"What's this?" Arthur says.

"The second layer." She sits down on one of the chairs. "If you're up for it."

"Oh, I'm up for anything." Eames sticks his hands in his pockets, though, and doesn't move. "What do you mean, second layer?"

"What, you think _I_ think you're all fun and games?" A smile wavers onto her mouth, briefly, then falls away. "You might not like this one as much."

That gets Eames into the chair and swabbing his wrist, and Arthur follows suit out of sheer curiosity. The personality designs are a nice conceit, well known to all of them now, able to be fleshed out or stacked above one another as a job requires. A defined second level to one of them has no real _use_. Which means something else is going on here.

"Ready?" Ariadne looks at them, nods, and sends them all down.

The light is dying; that's the first thing Arthur notices. He looks around, waiting for his eyes to adjust. There are only two stars in the sky so far, and enough dusk light left that he can move around easily without artificial lighting, which is just as well, because there isn't much. Pink neon flickers in his peripheral vision, lighting up a giant arrow which buzzes jarringly on and off and on.

"Hello?" he calls.

"Ferris wheel!" he hears, dimly. Ariadne.

The ferris wheel dominates the sky to his left, and Arthur heads towards its base through a fairground that's deserted, motionless, and eerie. The ramshackle booths and rides show only faded colours, and if the light were better he thinks he'd be able to see rust as well. Here and there the death rattles of more neon signs jump out at him.

As the ferris wheel looms closer one of the shadows wavers, splits and grows legs, and then shrinks as it comes towards him. Arthur exhales and loosens his stance, steady and wary, but it's Ariadne.

"Interesting," he says. "Where are we going?"

"Follow the arrow." She points. This one is a lurid green and seems to have more life in it than any of the others; it only flickers off every few seconds, and is quickly lit up again.

Ariadne strides just ahead of him in the direction that it indicates, and the green light slides down her profile, illuminating her expression of solemn satisfaction. This angle of her is becoming an anchor, something he associates with discovery. On instinct Arthur catches her up and takes her hand, and she sends him a quick glance. Her thumb brushes across his and she smiles.

Their destination doesn't look any different to the other sagging tents, but Arthur turns his steps towards it as soon as he sees the sign.

 _HALL OF MIRRORS_ it proclaims, and then, in smaller letters: _Your most fantastic inner selves revealed!_

"Eames is inside," Ariadne says unnecessarily, and pauses at the entrance.

"What is it?"

"Nothing." She doesn't move. After a pause she reaches up to push back the hood of the red sweater she's wearing, tightens her hold on Arthur's hand, and then steps into the tent.

In place of a floor there is only patchy flattened grass and wide areas of dirt. The interior seems brighter than outside, though there's no light source visible; just the mirrors that reflect, and reflect, the rays of it between them. They're taller and wider than a person and are set side-by-side in a long curve that follows the tent's wall almost all the way around, forming an incomplete circle. Eames is standing with his hands in his pockets, facing away from the entrance, but as soon as they walk in his reflections all lift one hand to wave in unison. For a split second Arthur doesn't think that Eames himself initiated the motion, but no, he must have, because the hand's out of his pocket when he turns around.

It takes a moment. They look at each other and at the mirrors, and Ariadne gives a quiet click in her throat that could be a quickly-abandoned attempt at speech, and Arthur can't relax because Eames never looks this intent unless they're working -- sometimes not even then.

Ariadne gives a go-on wave of her hand -- well? -- and Eames huffs his breath out through a sort of smile, but his eyes aren't any less sharp.

" _Not_ in Kansas any more, then." His accent should make it absurd. He has his totem balanced on one crooked finger, and then his wrist moves and it flies, turning, into the air. He and Ariadne follow it upwards but some instinct keeps Arthur's gaze on the mirrors, and just as the chip teeters at the top of its trajectory, the reflection of Eames closest to him looks straight into Arthur's eyes and winks.

A shiver skates across Arthur's skin, and he looks around. The mirrors aren't faithful, or else there's something in the air that warps the image, because each Eames looks captured in a different mood, like those charts of basic facial expressions constructed by anthropologists: here is what humanity means, these contortions of muscle and skin. Anger fear surprise sadness joy disgust; Arthur thinks, God, how does he know which of them is _him_? -- and something falls into focus.

What they're standing in is the white mask, rolled out thin and sculpted anew; something in which only other people's emotions are real. Arthur wants to grab Eames and ask how, how does he do it, how is he not _terrified_ that one day he'll try to turn back into Eames after being someone else, and realise that he no longer knows who that person is. How does he manage it without dissolving?

How do you guard yourself if you aren't yourself?

"Arthur," Eames says. "I really don't know what you're looking for in there, but I don't think it's going anywhere."

"Are you sure?" Arthur turns to face the real Eames, who doesn't look anything but amused. "Have you seen these mirrors? I don't think I trust them."

"Of course not. That's what makes it fun."

"Fun."

"You are familiar with the concept?"

This is easy, grounding. In another mood Arthur might let himself feel the sting only partially meant, but today he plays along.

"I find my work is plenty fun enough."

A laugh from Ariadne. "Says the man who conned me into kissing him in the middle of a job."

"Ouch," says Eames, cheerfully. "Precision _and_ accuracy. I stand corrected."

Ariadne looks pleased with herself, both on her own face and -- Arthur checks -- in the mirrors. But the longer he looks, the more blurred she appears, as though Arthur will need to arrange his eyes into a new position in order to call her into sharper focus. Without her edges defined she looks younger, and when Arthur gives the mirror an experimental Magic-Eye squint the red hoodie she's wearing becomes less distinct around the arms until the fabric hangs down like a cloak.

"Don't," she says, wolf-sharp.

"You brought us here," he reminds her.

"Not for me."

All right. He won't push; he owes her this, at least. "I did con you, in the hotel," he says. "Sorry."

"I didn't mind. Much." Her eyes, her eyes alone, now reflect clear and bright. "Your timing sucked, though."

He can't read her humour yet. He's learning. She doesn't help him out, however, just moves closer and touches his arm, then points towards exactly what he's been trying not to look at.

When he moves his reflection seems almost to pre-empt him, moving with a sharp grace that he can't feel in his limbs. The differences are subtle. Perhaps he's taller, perhaps his colouring more stark, and his clothes --

Ariadne says, "It's like you're wearing armour."

Arthur flicks his eyes to Eames's reflection, then Ariadne's, then back. He lifts a hand to touch his waistcoat, which is as silken as ever, with lines of black thread against the grey. Only in the mirror does it _look_ like chainmail. But Arthur's chest goes tight with awareness of it, because expensive fabric is exactly that: a safety measure. The final tug that settles the knot of his tie in place, creating light pressure around his neck, has always been the click of a key in a lock. Pressed wool and starched cotton can act as scaffolding and keep him upright and expressionless when he's exhausted, or uncertain, or struck boneless with desire like sun glancing off glass.

"Ariadne, this place is…" Unsettling. Incredible. And familiar in a way that Arthur can't put his finger on, something about the scent of the air and the way the horizon outside was bleeding light between the silent metal structures. Something about that grace with which his reflection moves. "I would never have been able to do this," he says, which is inadequate.

Eames looks up. "That's because you lack --"

"Imagination." Arthur strokes the glass, feeling a light film of grease come away on his fingertips. He turns around and again doesn't know which of them to look at, doesn't know if he should be telling them that he understands the design. "That's all this is. There's no real centre, it's just -- tricks."

"Smoke and bloody mirrors," says Eames, who isn't smiling at all; of course _he_ understands, he'd worked it out before they walked in. "Ariadne."

"I did warn you," she says.

"I'm not flattered."

"You're not supposed to be."

She stands there, unflinching in the dirt, and Arthur realises that the very existence of this dream level is Ariadne's way of revealing something about herself as well. He's never doubted her courage, but this is something very different to facing danger as part of a job, because what's at stake isn't as tangible. This was a risk; a gamble. She and Eames are far more alike than he'd known, and Arthur feels, for a split second, very out of place. He curls one hand up upon itself and feels the smoothness of his shirt cuff.

"Is this your opinion of me, Columbine?" Eames says finally.

"It's only the second layer," she says. "There's more to you than this. But this is still true."

"Ariadne."

"That mostly means _no_ ," she says, and bites her lip.

Eames looks straight at her and gives a smile that Arthur has never seen before. The mirrors snatch up the beautiful line of his mouth and echo it into eternity like a deck of cards fanned out by an expert hand. He steps towards her and her hands clench, flutter, at her sides, giving away her anxiety; part of Arthur thinks, _we'll need to train that out of her_. Eames leans down, slowly enough that Ariadne could back away, and lifts her chin with two fingers and kisses her. It's as though flexibility is passed between their mouths: she's still for a moment and then her body takes on a slow supple bend, leaning into it, giving herself up. Arthur's own mouth goes dry and wanting at the sight of it but when he looks away he can't escape their reflections.

It doesn't last longer than a few small eons of Arthur's heart beating. Eames kisses her cheek, too, before he pulls away. "Arthur's right. Nobody else could have done this."

"And nobody else would understand what it means," she says, unsteady.

"That's it. That's the truth of the profession. Dreamers will always be dreamers, and they'll befriend other dreamers, and love other dreamers, because -- well, you know how big it is. There’s no room for something like that _between_ people. It has to…" Eames waves a hand "…envelop them both."

"Cobb and Mal --" she starts.

"It doesn't have to be like that," Arthur says.

She looks at him with challenge in her face. "So how can it be, Arthur?"

"Unfair, pet." Eames puts a hand on her arm, bends his head to whisper something further. Ariadne doesn't look away from Arthur but she softens, infinitesimally, and the light in the room gives a flicker.

A feeling crawls up Arthur's spine and cradles his skull: the same feeling he used to get when he was working with people who kept him need-to-know and never told him the whole story, the feeling he had as soon as Fischer's mental army showed up. He is aware of where his own knowledge stops. He is aware, uneasily, of the existence of a larger design.

~

Arthur declares that they've been spending too much time asleep and the two-week holiday is mandatory. Saito has worked some kind of magic with his airline whereby any of them can show up at any bookings desk in any airport and get a free ticket on any flight, so most of them leave the country with the intention of expelling Parisian air from their lungs. Arthur doesn't ask any questions, but because it's his job to know these things he knows that Yusuf flies home to see his family, Ariadne spends a week shut in her room finishing her assignments and a week sketching churches in Sicily, and Eames goes to Singapore where he happily gambles away half of his money.

Arthur himself flies first class to America and visits Dom. He spends the first day listmaking, noting the little changes in his friend that indicate -- not complete happiness, but less _un_ happiness than before. Since Mal's death the two of them have held their grief between them like the lingering pressure of a coffin's edge against the shoulder. Most of the weight fell to Dom, of course. But Arthur's always been aware of his own share in the burden; of the loss, connecting them; one person pulls away and the other feels it.

He does look better, Arthur thinks. Lighter. His face will never unlearn the lines that her death etched in it, but it could be gaining some new ones around the mouth; Arthur keeps an eye out for them when Dom laughs. Which he does, frequently -- at James running headlong into Arthur's legs with a joyous shout, at a shared memory, at Arthur's description of the spray-fountain in Ariadne's garden.

He's nodding, too. "Saito told me a bit about those designs."

Arthur is primarily surprised that this doesn't surprise him. "Don't tell me: he already has five jobs lined up for us."

"He has plans," Dom admits. "But he likes the fact that you've decided to put things on hold for a year."

"That reminds me --"

"Heather? I found her -- Argentina, this time. But she's finishing that job at the end of this week, and she's happy to help out."

"For a price," Arthur guesses.

"For nostalgia." Dom smiles. "And a price. I gave Saito her details."

"I'm starting to feel like a kept man."

"He considers us --" Dom's no forger, but he has a good eye, and he draws himself up in a passing imitation of Saito's most earnest and opaque manner. "A _promising investment._ "

"And Heather's the best."

"Mm." Dom looks down at his coffee for a while. "That particular training. Do you think it's necessary?"

"Necessary? Maybe not. Valuable? Yes. I don't like surprises. And I know you don't like your people to be easily surprised."

"Arthur. If it's about Fischer --"

"Don't," Arthur says more curtly than he'd intended. A bruise there, still, and he presses down on it quite often enough himself; he doesn't need Dom to lend a hand.

"All this training," Dom says eventually. "I'm going to be out of shape."

Arthur laughs, mostly out of gratitude. "Sure."

They've known each other for long enough that they don't need to make conversation just for the hell of it. The clock on the kitchen wall ticks away into their safe silence; Dom glances at at and Arthur wonders if he's counting down the year or if he misses the work, the satisfaction of it, the tight thrill of manipulation. He mustn't have dreamt in months. Arthur can't even imagine how it must feel to spend that long in a reality over which your mind has no control at all.

~

"You weren't the one who trained Fischer, were you?" Ariadne asks. "Because that could be, you know. Awkward."

"Robert Fischer? No, no. I haven't been to Australia in years. Last time I was there, though --" and Heather launches into a story about a scuba enthusiast whose extraction took place in a dreamscape like a coral reef. Arthur's heard this one before, and it's been embellished in the interim. Yusuf has forgotten about unpackaging his tourniquets and Ariadne is glued wide-eyed to the woman's side.

"Where'd you find this one?" asks Eames from beside him.

"She worked some jobs with me and Cobb, a long time ago. Good extractor. But she's better at what she does now."

"Aren't we on opposite sides, then?"

"I'm not a great believer in sides, Mr Eames," Heather says. She's keeping track of their conversation as well; Arthur had forgotten that she does that. "I believe in people paying me to give them a fair chance."

"A philosopher after my own heart," Eames says, planting himself in a chair. "Shall we get started?"

Heather moves to stand next to Arthur, and in her implausible heels she's just as tall as he is. Her red hair's much shorter these days, cropped pixie-like in a way that shows off her freckles.

"Is that what you're here for, then?" Ariadne says. "To teach us how to defend our minds against -- people like us?"

"Not today. Arthur?"

"The aims of this session are twofold," Arthur lies. "To try out one of the stock designs on a subject who's unfamiliar with it, and to learn just how well-militarised a subconscious can be."

"If you can get past me, you can get past anyone."

Eames taps two fingers against his lips, thoughtful. "Can we? Get past you."

"No," she says sweetly. "Cobb thinks -- Arthur, maybe."

"I've improved," Arthur says.

"Not that much, my dear." She's probably right.

"The manor?" Ariadne asks. "It's the most self-contained, and the one we've done the most training in already."

They do use the manor. Heather's subconscious tweaks the décor and the whole thing ends up looking like the scrupulously upkept private haven of an eccentric art collector. Most of the projections seem to be engaged in filming some sort of period drama, which Arthur learns by wandering into a room full of lighting equipment and bored girls in large dresses. One of them, clicking her lighter a safe distance from the lace around her neck, gives him a look that could become suspicious given half a chance.

"Has anyone seen Johnson? If he's forgotten again…" Arthur tugs his cell out of his pocket, speed-dials a random number, and slams it next to his ear. "Christ," he snarls, and doesn't look to see if anyone's buying it before he stalks out of the room, pulse steady, feet light. This is his job. This is what he does.

Nevertheless, he's a bit thrown when someone answers the phone.

"Colin Firth speaking," says a familiar voice.

"Eames. Hold on." Arthur makes two lefts and finds the room he was looking for, barely more than a storage space. He lets himself in, closes the door, and leans against it. "Where are you?"

"The kitchens. Which are now _craft services_. I'm setting out sandwiches."

"Have you seen anyone else?"

"Yusuf started in the cellars, and now he's in raptures about our host's taste in Australian whites. He's going to try the second-floor bedrooms."

"Where do you think --"

"You know her better than I do."

Arthur leaves a beat of silence. This is easier over the phone. "Not necessarily," he says.

"Was that a compliment?"

"Keep calm, Mr Eames."

"This is a film set," Eames says. "I haven't seen an army yet. We've got some time to explore."

A group of people hurry past Arthur's door, too quickly for him to make out what they're saying.

"So, sandwiches," he says.

"Sod off," Eames says comfortably, and hangs up on him.

Arthur keeps his back against the door and counts to two hundred. Somewhere around ninety he has to force himself to slow down. Time, time, time to explore. He hadn't planned on hiding, but he's the one building this dream, and Heather pointed out earlier that no purpose would be served if he went and got himself shot before the others could learn anything.

Finally he slips out, following a route meticulously planned between one-hundred-and-four and one-hundred-and-eighty-nine. There are certain rooms that Ariadne has added to the first draft of the manor, planned to be enticingly private, small havens of security. She and Arthur had Dom on the speakerphone for two hours, arguing the speed and ease benefits of overdesigned locations for secrets against the greater stability of the dream when the subject's subconscious is allowed a stronger creative input. It's worth a try, at least.

He's looked in one of these rooms on the top floor -- no good -- and has just left the piano room, where a sober-faced child in a sailor suit is painstakingly picking out a tune that Arthur doesn't recognise, when his phone rings again.

"Arthur," Eames says, and he doesn't sound all that different but there's something there, a tension, a lack of levity, that tells Arthur everything he needs to know.

"Any luck?"

"Found the army." A hiss that could be his breath. "But never mind, if they haven't found you. This whole setup," he goes on. "It's not hiding, per se, but it's _distracting._ We're being diverted in our own labyrinth."

Arthur presses his fingers into his forehead and thinks. "Hiding in plain sight, that sort of thing?" It's happened; not everyone's mind turns to a safe or a vault as the predominant metaphor. And it stinks of studied professionalism.

"Perhaps," Eames says. "Is she a forger, Heather?"

"Not that I've seen. But it's possible. Why?"

"Nothing. Film crew," he says, and continues before Arthur can protest that that's hardly an explanation. "As projections go, they're very -- slick. Purposed. Not quite part of the scenery, you see where I'm going with this? If anything's hidden, it'll be right in the hub of -- I'm going to have to call you back."

Distant noise, just a quick soundbite of it, and then the beep.

Purposed. Arthur wonders if he's caught on. But he doesn't have time to wonder long, because the girl with the ruffled lace neckline is walking straight towards him holding a vicious-looking policeman's baton. Something glitters at him from within the lace.

"I don't think you're supposed to be here, young man," she says in a perfect BBC accent, which Arthur recognises from one night in Osaka when Eames drank half a dozen Manhattans and talked his way down the entire fucking UK from Inverness to Exeter.

"The aims of this session," Arthur mutters to himself, "are threefold."

Might as well get it over with.

It takes all the willpower he has to stand still while his instincts grab at his muscles and scream at him to dodge, to disable, to run. The projection looks bored as she swings the baton in an arc and smashes something important near Arthur's elbow, which erupts into agony and heat. He snatches at her throat with his functioning hand, tears loose the necklace, bankhands her across the face with enough force that she stumbles, and _then_ he runs.

 _Pain is real_ , Arthur thinks, and _qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet_ , and he wishes that he'd known sooner just how well Yusuf understands what it is they do every day.

The Latin gets stuck in his head, and it's as good a distraction mechanism as any. He recites it under his breath as he dashes down the polished stairs -- remembering the trick step just in time to avoid it -- each footfall sending more pain down his arm, and the words trip and tangle in his mouth until it's just lorem ipsum lorem ipsum over and over like a charm.

Like the tilted chairs, this is about strengthening their grasp on the rules of dreaming; it doesn't matter if Heather's chosen secret is never found. All that matters is that they feel _this_ , the drawn-out wail of the lizard brain trying to convince them to curl up into a ball and rock the pain away, and that they learn their own incredible capacity to ignore it.

He leaps from the seventeenth step and past a couple of men wearing audio headsets; they turn and start to follow him, but Arthur knows his manor's blueprint backwards. These are his walls, his shadowed corners. This is his freestanding wooden closet with the false back.

("Wardrobe," Eames said, when Ariadne showed them the secret passage -- plaintive, playing at hurt -- " _Wardrobe_ , haven't you people read your C.S. Lewis?")

There are footsteps in the dust ahead of him as he works his way through the tight space. Men's shoes, by the size. He emerges in another of those storage spaces, tries to remove his jacket, almost passes out at the pain this elicits. A tiny high window casts a slender ray of light -- with unnecessary drama, Arthur thinks -- down upon his hand, illuminating what lies within. Dust motes dance jerkily above the silver key that dangles on the end of the chain.

Right in the hub, Eames said.

Arthur arranges his face and goes to crash a film set again.

He has to dodge two more pairs of men with black clothes and headsets, who are looking less and less like sound engineers and more and more like special ops soldiers, but he tracks the noise on the ground floor to the largest room and leans in the doorway, idle, cradling his arm, in nobody's line of sight. Two of the actor-projections repeat the same exchange of flowery compliments over and over in front of the camera.

The furniture is still that elegant scrolled wood, and Arthur can see only two keyholes in the whole room: the two drawers set into the escritoire at which the woman is sitting. He probably has just one chance at this, his head is ringing, _rightleftrighleftrightleft?_ and finally he pulls his totem from his pocket.

"Evens right, odds left," he says under his breath; lets it fall silently onto the carpet beneath his feet; glances down. By now the pain is so bad he's sucking in air in rough bursts despite his best efforts, and an awful numbness has begun to congeal in his fingers.

Four.

"Excuse me," he says, loud, bored as can be. He strides straight across the floor where everyone can see him, gives the projection a polite smile as he comes to a halt beside her, and fits the key into the lock of the drawer on the right.

The click of the gun's safety is almost lost in the twin beats thudding in his chest and his broken arm -- almost. Arthur goes still, and releases his grip on the key.

"I'd raise my hands," he says. "But I'd rather not."

"Understandable."

He turns slowly and meets Heather's bright smile, coming at him down the unwavering barrel of the gun. She's wearing a baseball cap adorned by the word DIRECTOR.

"You _have_ improved," she says. "Your team, too -- very good. I can see why you're pushing them."

"How did they do?"

"Debriefing up top," she says, and pulls the trigger. Arthur's nose is itching like fury when he wakes up.

"In the face?" Yusuf says, sympathetic. "Me too. She barely blinked."

"Why didn't they just kill us to begin with?" Ariadne's cheeks are pale, her hands clasped tightly between her knees. "If her subconscious wanted us out of the dream, the projections could have killed us. Easily," she adds, not sounding happy about it.

Arthur hasn't been looking forward to this discussion. "Because Heather's subconscious is trained to the point where she has a certain amount of control over what her projections do. Because the point _wasn't_ to kill you."

"Ah," says Eames, and closes his eyes. In the same moment Heather opens hers with a sharp inhalation.

" _What_ ," says Ariadne in a thin voice.

Arthur says, because it's been dormant on his tongue, "Pain is real. Even when it's in your head. And even when we're only a single level down, we may not always have the luxury of kicking out, if the job's unfinished."

"Did you know?" she demands of Eames.

"Me? No, pet. Surprised me just as much as it did you, I assure you." He's not looking at Arthur. He doesn't sound angry. Arthur remembers the furious, efficient way Eames readied the gun to shoot Saito out of his pain, and indulges in a moment of wanting -- very badly and very irrationally -- to shake him.

"I wouldn't have known you were surprised," says Heather, sitting up. Arthur turns to her.

"Who was first out?" he asks.

"The architect," Heather says easily, and Arthur almost wants to hug her for the respect in that. For not saying: the girl.

"I'm sorry," Ariadne bursts out. "I didn't mean to, I shouldn't have, but I just -- they just -- kept going, and --"

Arthur cuts in: "Kept going?"

"Hardly shabby of her," Heather says, meeting his gaze. The fact that Heather has a medical background, that she fell into this by putting electrodes on people's scalps and reducing their inner lives to jagged lines on a long strip of paper, is sometimes apparent. And sometimes chilling. Not that any of them can afford to develop their consciences too highly, with the work they do, but there's professionalism and professionalism: there's Heather's eyes unwavering in the face of Ariadne's guilt, and there's Eames with his complex honour and his way of helping people hurtle smoothly between the poles of their own psychology.

And there's Arthur, who has never used mirrors for anything more perilous than checking his armour. Never scrutinised too closely anything that lies above the knot at his throat, or beneath the fragile protection of his ribcage.

"I'd heard there were some people who could do that, use their projections like tools," Eames says. "Hadn't run into any myself, though."

"It's a house of cards," Heather says. "Poke it too hard and it collapses. And it's exhausting, if you're doing it right."

"Could we learn it?" asks Ariadne.

Heather shrugs. "Perhaps. Start with hypnosis, if you can -- it helps to be easily suggestible, even though you'd assume the opposite. That plus militarisation and a lot of dull repetition has worked for me, though honestly, it isn't good for much unless you're guarding state secrets."

"Or scaring the living daylights out of hardworking dreamers," Eames says.

Heather glances at Arthur, who's prepared to accept full blame despite the fact that she said yes to the idea immediately; he suspected she would, which is why he asked Dom to find her.

He walks with her to the Métro entrance when the debriefing is done.

"They'll know what to expect tomorrow," he says.

"You don't need to rationalise to me, Arthur," she says to the coolness of the afternoon sky. If Arthur looks straight ahead all he hears is the click of her shoes on the Parisian street and she could be someone else. For a bittersweet moment she could be Mal, buying him chestnuts and talking him down from anger.

Eames is loitering -- no other word for it -- outside the building when Arthur returns. When Arthur's almost reached him, he flicks his cigarette aside and watches it smoulder.

Arthur sighs, waiting for the fight. "Tell me."

"I do appreciate it," Eames says.

"What?"

The corner of his mouth lifts. He looks tired. "The effort to keep me from boredom."

He could have said almost anything. He could have mentioned Ariadne. He could have said, _That wasn't very nice of you, love_ , in that soft tone that would have meant, _That was a bastard thing to do_ , and he would have been right and Arthur would have had to carefully not let it bother him.

Gratitude sweeps over Arthur like newly unclouded sunshine. He feels it as intensely as he feels just as tired as Eames looks, but he can't muster the energy to go about showing either of these emotions now that the mask of competency is in place. Too many ribbons to untie.

"I do my best," he says, meaning, _Thank you_ , and if anyone can translate that then it's Eames, and right now that fact isn't as infuriating as usual.

"What's the fuss?" Eames calls, when they're back inside.

Yusuf beams and lifts a scrap of paper.

"Heather?" Eames nods and prods him in the shoulder with a pen as he sits down. "Good man."

"Indeed." Yusuf gives the phone number -- or email, or whatever it is -- a besotted glance before putting it away in his wallet.

"Ariadne," Eames sings.

She tugs a banknote from her back pocket and slaps it into his open palm with a sigh. "No more betting with you," she says. "Ever."

Her hand is still in his. Eames squeezes the money between their palms. "I'm deeply hurt. Deeply."

Ariadne stays where she is, leaning against the side of Eames's chair, her elbow balanced on his shoulder. Ever since the twilight carnival they've had an extra thread between them, undefinable, but made up of closed distances. See: it's not that Arthur can't read people at all. It's that Eames can read things that _aren't there_ , except of course they always are. Yusuf and Heather -- it wasn't relevant, so Arthur wasn't looking.

"Arthur," Eames says. "If that face of deep thought means you're going to introduce a workplace rule against gambling, I must warn you, I will incite a mutiny."

Arthur looks up from their joined hands. "You've some experience in that area, I recall."

"The Bermuda job." Nostalgia tinges his smile. "Cobb did a wonderful job with that ship."

"A ship?" Ariadne's mouth is open. "I want to build a ship."

"Get him to show you when he comes back."

"A whole navy," she murmurs, leaning further against Eames. He reaches up to tug on her hair, but her mind is many dimensions of creation away, and she doesn't notice.

"This isn't the military," Eames says, and his eyes on Arthur are a warning.

~

"You realise you're singing, right?" Ariadne says.

Arthur closes his mouth and hears the cessation of sound, though he hadn't been aware of it in the first place. "What was it?"

"Christmas carols," she says, and if he lets his throat relax back into the memory of a tune, he finds it again. For someone who's not at all religious, Arthur has a fondness for the most obnoxiously pious carols; the melodies are like old friends. He simply can't stand any song that features Santa as the main theme.

" _And fields and floods, rocks hills and plains_ ," Ariadne demonstrates, in a voice that's sweet but only just on key.

"No wonder." Arthur gestures around them. The garden isn't as sunny this time, and the shadows cast by the huge trees are richly deep and cool, but the grass still stretches invitingly into the distance, and his head is full of the dark smell of soil.

" _Repeat the sounding joy_ ," Ariadne continues. " _Repeat the sounding joyyyy_ come on Arthur --"

He joins her: " _Repeat, repeat the sounding joy_."

"How on earth did you get him to sing?" Eames yells down.

The rope ladder tumbles rudely into view. Ariadne straightens it out and tests the bottom rung with her weight, absurdly, as though she might have dreamed them something flimsy. When satisfied she begins to climb; her calves are a brief flash of white before Arthur's eyes.

Once again the atmosphere is that of a summer vacation, childish and beguilingly lazy, with time a pleasant irrelevance. For a long while now Arthur's vacations have been much-needed solitary affairs, in large hotel rooms or other private spaces, with room service and uninterrupted sleep and rambling walks in wonderful isolation. Buying gifts for his nieces. Gently loosening the knots of himself from where the work's challenges have, by necessity, tightened them.

But this isn't a holiday and isn't training. As far as he can tell, this is Eames exacting a weird kind of revenge for the parts of the carnival he found least flattering.

"Arthur!" The ladder gives a twitch and he looks up. From here they are barely recognisable as themselves, just two heads with dabs of colour for hair, like background characters in a painting. He grabs hold of the ladder and hoists himself up.

It's not an easy climb: the flushness of both rungs and rope against the rough bark means his fingers and toes are smarting before he's halfway up. When he lifts himself ungraciously onto the floor of the treehouse he's feeling, strangely, much better about accompanying these two on whatever form of recreational psychotherapy this is. Scraped hands and aching muscles are things he already associates with dreams, and the vacation sense is receding.

"Not here?" No PASIV in sight.

"I thought we'd take a walk." Eames nods towards the far wall, which opens out onto a walkway edged with more rope.

From this height a lot of the garden should be visible, but they're deep amongst the enormous trees and Arthur can only catch short glimpses of the open lawns, the occasional flash of sunlight off bronze. The air is cool and soaks him with calm.

"You were one of those kids who read too much, weren't you?" Ariadne says.

"What makes you say that?"

She pauses, setting the walkway rocking beneath them, and points into the distance. Through a gap in the thick branches a well-trimmed lawn skewered with croquet hoops can be seen. Projections bustle to and fro; their voices can't be heard, but red and black skirts dominate the chaos, and the mallets are suspiciously pink and unwieldy. Arthur squints, trying to keep his eye on one of the balls, waiting for it to uncurl and scurry away in prickly defiance of physics.

"If you build a child's paradise, don't be surprised when someone's childhood leaks in," Eames says. "Genius loci."

"You are abusing my education," Ariadne mutters, and keeps moving.

On the rough wood floor of the treehouse they reach, three mattresses are laid out around the PASIV device; Arthur touches the nearest one dubiously, but it's neither damp nor dirty, despite appearances.

"Pillows too," he says. "A nice touch, thank you."

"Anything to preserve your posture," Ariadne says.

Remembering the fairground, Arthur goes to sleep tense, ready for anything, but it can be difficult to perpetuate mental states across the transition. There are always those initial few moments of disorientation in which you are exactly what the dream is telling you to be.

So Arthur's first thought is something like: that's a nice shade of green.

The hedges are his height and then half as high again, and when he stretches out his arms his fingers barely brush the trimmed leaves on either side. It's impeccably neat, all severe right angles, and it really is a nice shade of green: the same deep colour as the foliage around the treehouses, lit with emerald undertones. Eames has obligingly carried over the shoeless theme from the garden, and the dirt underfoot is packed firm.

"At the risk of sounding obvious," Eames calls from somewhere invisible, "I suggest we convene in the centre."

Arthur swallows a sigh, plucks a twig and lays it down in the dirt where he's standing, and sets off down one of the two identical paths available to him.

"Easy!" Ariadne shouts, before long. "Red door, right?"

"Wait a tick," Eames shouts back. "We'll be right with you."

"Speak for yourself," says Arthur, who has run into a dead end.

"You _really_ can't build a decent maze."

"Not what I'm paid for," says Eames's voice, now closer to where Ariadne's is coming from. Without much confidence, Arthur turns his steps in that direction.

"Arthur, it's a piece of cake," Ariadne calls.

Arthur smiles to the empty air. "You've never seen me in an environment I don't already know."

"No way," she says, sounding delighted. "You can't do mazes?"

"Not unseen. Not unless they have underlying rules --"

"-- and that kind doesn’t work, the subconscious figures them out, I know."

Arthur arrives two days early for most jobs in new cities, preferably three, and soaks up streetmaps until he can be certain he won't be late to anything.

"Are you worse than a projection?" Ariadne adds.

"That'd depend on who was projecting," Arthur says, and runs into another dead end. "Eames, are you moving these hedges?"

"Not even a little."

Three minutes later he rounds a corner that looks like every other corner, but this one reveals Ariadne, already sketching part of the maze in the dirt with her toes, and Eames, leaning against a red door set into the central ring of hedges.

"Can we help you with anything?" Eames smiles politely. "Ball of string, perhaps?"

Arthur gives him the finger, then wishes he hadn't. Juvenile. Though he _also_ had the urge to poke out his tongue, and at least he resisted that one.

"Now we're all here…" Ariadne reaches for the handle of the door. Eames pushes himself off it.

"Any wagers?" Eames asks. "Yes? No?" He sounds facetious, but it's an interesting question. If Arthur were describing a second layer of Ariadne's personality, what would he place at the centre?

Ariadne dances her hand thoughtfully on the brass knob of the door handle. "No wager," she says, smiling. "I don't trust you not to change it."

"O ye of little faith." Eames closes one hand around hers and the knob both, and twists, and they push the door open and walk through.

Arthur did a job once for a man whose wealth had been acquired rapidly, and whose meteoric rise into the ranks of the world's billionaires had left him breathless, twitchy, and paranoid. He invited Arthur to sit down in a leather chair that was so soft it took a fair effort to get out of it -- Arthur, twitchy in his own ways, perched awkwardly on the edge and dug his toes into the opulent carpet -- and sat back behind his ridiculous desk and rearranged his platinum-trimmed pens made by Giorgio Armani. In the middle of the desk was one of those petite Zen gardens, filled with fine white sand and small tools and a bonsai tree with such exquisitely arching branches that Arthur was tempted to steal the thing and carry it out of the saturated, over-luxurious picture that was the rest of the office.

If that businessman had poured some of his money into the fad of supersizing, Arthur thinks now, the finished product might have looked something like this: not like the traditional gardens from which that executive toy was derived, but like a comically large reproduction of the toy itself.

The centre of the maze is a square spread corner to corner with that pale tropical-island sand, smooth and spotless, as though a tide has only just receded and left nothing for beachcombers to discover beyond a few grey boulders and a pile of sandcastle-building equipment left behind by careless oversized children. Arthur feels the twin urges to sit down in the sand and close his eyes, and to turn cartwheels across the pristine expanse of it.

Ariadne has walked over to the pile of tools, and now nudges with her foot a black rake. "All right," she says. "What is it meant to be?"

"I don't know," Eames says. "Which shouldn't surprise you, because you don't know -- you don't know what shape you want to take. It could be almost anything." He bends, picks up the rake, and presses it into her hand. It takes her longer than it should to grip it. "It could be nothing, as yet. It takes all that effort to reach the centre and what's waiting for us could be nothing at all."

Ariadne looks at him. "You don't believe that," she says.

"Mm, what was it you said? _Mostly_ no."

Arthur itches, superfluous, sand between his toes. He thinks he understands. It's perhaps no crueller than the mirrors. "The potential's there," he says; gestures to the rake. "The theme is still change, isn't it?"

Ariadne moves suddenly, walking to the centre of the square and then dragging the rake in an angry swirl behind her as she treads in expanding circles, a many-toothed spiral taking shape in the sand. When the rake finally strikes one of the boulders she stops and walks the perimeter, leaning out over the spiral and making quick jabs with the wrong end of the rake, closing off clear spaces between the lines and opening others. It's recognisable, just, as a circular maze.

She turns on Eames when she's done, her eyes unfriendly. "A child's paradise," she says. "Point taken. But you know what, _fuck_ you, what do you expect from me? I'm a _student_. I'd never been employed apart from shitty minimum-wage things before Prof Miles handed me over to Cobb. I don't have any exciting stories about past jobs. I don't have a mysterious past. I've never lived in Mumbasa. I've never hated anything, or suffered anything, not really. I've never -- been a lover." Her voice, bitter and too high, falters for only a moment. "I don't even know how I would make it fit. In my life."

Arthur thinks about anonymous cities rising at her command and the uncomfortable way she wore the grey suit. Her lips barely moving underneath his, and the way she moved against Eames like an awakening. Children's toys made to fit her barely adult hands.

She sighs and sinks down into herself. "I want to build," she says. "I know I can, I know I'm _good_ , but I'm afraid I haven't got much to build with. Not yet."

"You are good," Arthur tells her. "You're an amazing architect, Ariadne, and everything else -- that'll come. You've got years."

"More than years." She looks at him then away, back at the pattern she's made. "Old souls. Not just Cobb, but all of you. You've lived through so much more than your bodies have."

"True, but I wouldn't wish the shape of my life on you," Eames says. "You'll build something better."

"I did want to thank you both," she says to the spiral in the sand. Arthur looks at Eames, who gives a subtle shrug. They wait and Ariadne looks up; if her anger's still there, it's well masked. "For never telling me that I'm too young to do this job. For never even suggesting it."

"Wouldn't have dreamed of it," Eames says, warmly, and Ariadne gives a tiny snort of laughter; it takes Arthur a second longer to catch the pun, distracted as he is by this insecurity that he never suspected her of harbouring. But he remembers being new to the world of dreaming, and suffocating in wonder, and hiding it.

"Absolutely not," he says. "I couldn't have asked for a better architect."

Ariadne throws the rake to the ground and smiles at him, hiding nothing, and Arthur wants her fiercely, all of her, her straight-faced brilliance and her clear-eyed nerve. It fills him up like hot water. He thinks for no real reason about the elevators and the dazzling glass of Saito's tower.

She's close enough that he doesn't have to move his feet, just reach out; the fine skin of her temple is _right there_ but he denies himself simply for the tight pleasure of it, holds his fingertips so close that he can feel the heat coming from her body. He brushes back her hair, instead, and Ariadne tilts her head as he follows one thick strand of it down the side of her face, letting it glide between his fingers, finally winding the end of it around one. He's always loved women's hair, the fall of it, the minute roughness of it like good-quality silk.

"For future reference," Ariadne says solemnly, " _this_ is good timing."

She puts one hand against his cheek and rises to open her mouth against his as if thirsty for something, warm and lovely, and Arthur closes his eyes and forces his brain to a standstill.

That can't last, obviously.

He was hoping that this would be uncomplicated, symbolic; this deep in anyone's dreams, everything can be a symbol one way or another. But when she lowers herself back onto the flats of her feet and the kiss breaks, they gaze at each other for a period of time that Arthur recognises as dangerous.

Ariadne's throat moves as she swallows.

"It's fucking alarming the way you look at people sometimes," she says. "Like you're taking them apart."

It takes all the effort he has for a few seconds just to remain standing where he is, not pulling away; giving her that. He nails his feet to the dirt and smiles at her.

He says, "And yet I can't do mazes."

"No." Her smile is the one that releases them, like the unclasping of a latch. "No, you're _terrible_ , how have you lasted so long?"

"By always knowing the blueprint before I go in."

"When it comes to exciting stories, Ariadne, you've got at least one," Eames says. "I'd say that being the architect for the first successful inception team in the industry's history would get you a few rounds of drinks in most bars."

"Most bars _you_ know," she teases, but she's alight again and Eames is as well, just like those weird mirrors, tossing it back and forth between them.

In the dream industry there's an unspoken agreement that professionals ignore the intimacy of being inside another person's head, but what these two are doing, what they are dragging Arthur into, is something else entirely. Arthur uses his left foot to kick up a small amount of sand, leaving a dimpled half-moon mark, thinking with a rush of vertigo -- _what the hell am I doing?_ He's never been one for games, and this is starting to feel like one, played for troublingly obscure stakes. He's never been one for unnecessary risks.

But holding him in place is the echo of Ariadne's lips, like the echo of Eames's smile that lingered in the mirrors; like a promise encoded and passed along.

~

"What is it this time?"

"Do you really want to know?"

Eames appears to give the question serious thought. "You know how I love your surprises, Arthur," he says finally.

It's the two of them, and Yusuf humming away over his bottles; Ariadne refuses to be pulled away from the final alterations to the last major project of her degree, and Arthur doesn't want to give her this particular training session just yet. Not while she's still getting the hang of deliberate violence.

"No more tilting, I assume." Eames addresses the question to Yusuf, who looks up and goes through an elaborate mime of zipping his mouth and pointing to Arthur, and then makes some other gestures that Arthur can't interpret because unlike Eames he hasn't known Yusuf for years and also isn't _mad_.

"No more tilting," Arthur says, and tacks on, "for today," just to watch the way Eames smiles with that edge of bemused insolence, like he can't decide which of them is the responsible one.

"It's honestly tragic that I have nothing better to do with my time."

"Nobody's forcing you to stick around," Arthur points out.

"What can I say?" Eames is rolling back his sleeves. "You've spoiled me, you lot have."

"We're flattered," says Yusuf. "Or we would be, if I was not sure that your ego is just delighted at the prospect of doing jobs in a dream environment that is all about _you_."

"That must be it," Eames says.

Arthur's wound-up enough that there's a fair dose of selfishness in this exercise, and he's determined he won't be the first one to take a hit this time. The dream doesn't need him to be anything other than how he feels anyway, which is: tense. Impatient. Aware of where his limbs are, and the negative space between himself and Eames.

Eames blocks his first kick. "Ariadne was right," he says, his eyes narrowed at Arthur's face. "About the way you --"

Arthur's foot twinges but he follows it up, moving as fast as he can, playing to his strengths. Every time Eames opens his mouth to finish the sentence or start a new one, Arthur tries to make it impossible. He's not in the mood to talk or even to listen, not until he's purged the worst of whatever is under his skin.

He gets in close enough to slam the heel of his hand against the other man's nose, but before he can retreat Eames lifts a knee and slams Arthur over it and Arthur reaches for the ground as he falls, trying to plan his recovery, but _Christ_ , his ribs. Just gulping in air is setting off new kinds of pain in his upper chest. He lands on his side and scrambles to his feet again with no grace at all. His hair is loose, threatening to fall across his eyes, but he's already feeling better. Sometimes he needs to use precision and sometimes he can loosen his grasp on himself, let the adrenalin dictate its own steps. It's easier like this, of course. Arthur's body is beginning to sing of its own accord.

He takes a step to the side and isn't at all surprised when he misjudges his centre of gravity; stumbles for a mere moment and then finds himself again. He doesn't laugh, but he does smile.

An answering smile comes back at him, bright and not unsuspicious. "Not in top form today, love, I must --"

Eames cuts himself off, the set of his mouth seguing into startlement, as though a new taste has crept onto his tongue and announced itself. Then he takes a quick, casual step to the side -- they could be dancing -- Arthur's smile is bordering on wide now, especially when Eames too almost overshoots his own intentional shift of weight.

"Surprise," Arthur says quietly, and attacks: this time he forces Eames's wrist to an excruciating angle and is starting to twist when _his_ arms fly upwards, _his_ shoulder burns out a brief reminder of exactly where it would and wouldn't like to be in relation to its own socket, and he sees the next punch coming but doesn't have time to do more than admire the sheer dirty skill that Eames is displaying even with his motor skills impaired. He concentrates instead on not breaking his arm when he falls -- again -- and on whipping together a plan for retaliation that is foiled by the sudden weight of Eames holding him against the floor.

It's somehow tempting to just close his eyes and relax, but that's not who he is, and besides, then he'd be missing out on the fact that Eames is trying half-heartedly to glare at him. Really, it is an absolute fucking crime that someone who looks like Eames should spend so much time looking like everyone else.

"We're drunk, aren't we? That's what Yusuf is doing."

"Yes." Arthur is dizzy and soft and in control.

"Well," Eames says. "I do feel that my attractive muscular frame is giving me an advantage here. _You're_ drunk. _I'm_ tipsy."

"Take any advantage you think you have," says Arthur. This is still a lesson.

"Take advantage?" Eames laughs and rolls aside, gets to his feet and doesn't sway at all. "No, Arthur. I'm not making it that easy for you."

Arthur stands slowly, using the time to feel out his new limitations. This fight won't be like the last one, even though most of him could be persuaded that the room is tilting; is spinning, gently. Fuck.

Eames goes on, "Maybe I'm missing the point, here, but I rather think the likelihood of anyone deliberately tampering with our blood alcohol levels is --" His face moves -- irritatingly, not in the way of a drunk person groping for the right syllable, but in the way of someone flicking through an inner thesaurus for _le mot juste._

" _Minuscule_?" Arthur suggests, and only remembers when Eames's mouth quirks that he tends to veer French when drunk. Mal's fault, of course. His French isn't even particularly good; certainly not as good as his accent implies.

"Yes," Eames says.

Arthur frowns. Snatches up the threads of this conversation from where they are trying to drift out of order. "I want us to be prepared. To be able to function through anything."

"Whatever you say, darling."

The appraising look Eames is giving him makes his arm muscles feel fluid, ready to move, itching for contact. He can feel the negative space again, an odd gravity of sorts, the distinct absence of skin against his palms. The absence of pressure. It must be visible, feels like it _should_ be visible, this sudden and unbearable awareness that Arthur has of himself as being perfectly alone in three-dimensional space.

Eames goes on, "You've never been the type to get drunk where other people can see you."

"That's ridiculous. Boston," Arthur says, bending down one finger. "Osaka. Hm. Capetown. Yusuf's birthday, here."

"Drinking," Eames agrees. "Not drunk."

Arthur knows better, but he also knows that he goes quiet when drunk; stays on his stool, or chair, and smiles on the outskirts of conversations and holds himself with even more care than usual. He likes and doesn't like the way it brings out the parts of him that he has to bite his tongue against, the way his everyday desires course surfacewards when normally they take the form of a deep seam embedded low and dark, with only the faintest surface flecks hinting at what could be extracted given time and sweat and the right tools. The look Eames gives him now is a fine brush, seeking, shifting some dirt away from a hint of shine.

Arthur punches him to escape it, hard on the nose again, pleased when his knuckles come away faintly red. Eames gives a muffled sigh and snaps Arthur's head sideways with a blow to the jaw, hooks a near-crippling foot into the side of his knee; Arthur narrows his eyes and wishes for furniture, for an even smaller room, because what he really wants is the harsh satisfaction of solid surfaces, and --

Ah. It wasn't a deliberate addition, but that’s an alcohol thing, apparently: a low table has appeared not far from where the two of them are wheezing, and Arthur steadies himself above his sore knee for long enough to plant a kick, show-off high, about the level of Eames's diaphragm, shoving him backwards far enough that he trips over the table and falls with a crash.

"You're cheating again," Eames coughs, rolling in splinters.

Arthur rolls his shoulders, warm and buzzing, uncaring. Eames should know better -- they _both_ should, he and Ariadne both, with their knowing looks and their intrusive fucking trust, but Eames has worked in dreams for years and he of all people should recognise a warning when he's being thrashed by one.

Maybe Arthur does like to talk in fights, just not with words. He dreams a tall standing lamp with a cobalt blue shade and uses it to say _This definitely isn't the military, Mr Eames_. Eames has a nasty scratch on his neck when he yanks the lamp out of Arthur's hands and tries to trip him with it. _Pas d'armes_ , Arthur decides, and dreams a heavy desk chair on near-frictionless wheels which he sends careening hard at Eames's legs. It's about then that he notices the lack of detail in the dojo's walls, the feeling of unease and unreality starting to make itself known through the buzz as the dream wavers and becomes less convincing. It could be all the rapid alterations, but it's probably his blood alcohol level.

Eames takes advantage of his momentary pause to shove aside the furniture and land a blow on Arthur's chin that -- " _Fuck._ " -- spills blood into his mouth as he's forced to bite down too hard and too abruptly on his own tongue. He grabs hold of Eames by the forearm and wishes that his nails were something longer, rougher, than their usual utilitarian state. His self-image is too stubborn in dreams, it's why he's never been a forger, he averages himself out across recent memory and remains Arthur, just Arthur, untouchable and unflappable Arthur.

What. Why is he. He's distracted. No: drunk. _Ivre_. He can taste copper in his mouth and the dojo's ceiling is beginning to shimmer obligingly, the boundaries are disintegrating. He wouldn’t convince a child with this dream.

He hears the motion before he feels it, hears the far-off thump of his own back hitting the floor -- which is too hard, shifting metallic; it hurts like hell -- and then realises that Eames is kneeling on his legs, one hand wrapped far too loosely around Arthur's throat.

"Take it seriously," Arthur snarls, spitting blood.

The light in the room is now attractively golden, reflected off the ceiling. Eames has blood on his lips too, smudged down from one nostril, and he's smiling.

"Look at you," he says, light as anything, and Arthur really truly cannot deal with this in his present state. He doesn't know what's been washed away from his face. He can barely hold the walls up.

He dreams himself an awkward gun that backfires and kills both of them at once; if he's lucky, Eames will believe that this was deliberate.

Yusuf hurries towards him as soon as Arthur starts fiddling with a cannula. "Let me," he orders. There's an extra line in Arthur's right forearm for the ethanol solution, and a drip set up beside him. When both lines are out Arthur rolls his shirtsleeves down and fastens the cuffs, one after the other, his fingers slipping on the buttons. On close enough inspection his arms are the arms of anyone in the industry: veins speckled with scars from cannula after cannula. He can tell a tech his five best access points and three more for emergencies, and the veins on the back of his right hand were blown four years ago. He's stopped donating blood. _Je ne something plus le sang_. If he ever knew the verb he's forgotten it.

"Christ," slurs Eames, beside him. "S'even worse up here."

Arthur leans back in his chair. If he fumbled his cuffs then he's not risking standing up. "Sleep it off."

"Yusuf, fix a man a saline cocktail, f'pity's sake." Eames waves his wrist.

"Arthur?"

Arthur's sleeves are staying down. "Thanks. No. I'll take my hydration the old-fashioned way."

Yusuf laughs and tosses him a bottle of water, which Arthur barely manages to catch.

~

Two days after Ariadne sits her last exam they're crammed into a campus security vehicle in the middle of the University of Yusuf, going faster than they really need to. They've just come from sitting down to a truly disgusting cafeteria meal with a projection of Jeremy St John's sister, who ate most of the soggy fries off Ariadne's plate but didn't seem very willing to talk about her brother.

"Where now?" Ariadne inquires. The vehicle isn't much more than a glorified golf cart, but she's treating it like the Ferrari she's always wanted. Arthur clings to the open side of his seat and decides to enjoy it.

"The library." Eames consults a notebook. It takes a second for Arthur to recognise it as his, and another for him to pat irritably at the inside pocket of his jacket where he was keeping it.

"When did you lift that?"

"Half an hour ago," says Ariadne. "You were bitching about your salad."

Arthur shudders.

"Well it wasn't _my_ fault," she says. "Wait. Was it?"

"Probably not, unless dreadful food was part of your initial design. Otherwise, our subject probably has exaggerated the memory of his own college food into whatever the hell I was putting in my mouth back there."

"That's _my_ college food you're talking about." She nods. "All right. Why the library?"

Eames finishes writing with what looks suspiciously like Arthur's pen, and looks over. "If you can't get any information out of close relatives, it usually means the subject's brain doesn't tend towards sociality. It's related to theory of mind: they project their knowledge of the people in their life, but haven't got enough sophistication of interpersonal understanding to give the projections the same knowledge of _them_. I was on a team that tried to extract from a woman with severe Asperger's, once, it was a complete nightmare -- the projections were walking cut-outs, and her ways of symbolising information made no sense to any of us."

"Jeremy's not that bad," Ariadne protests.

Jeremy St John is the son of British expats and, like Ariadne, has just graduated with his architecture degree. He was chosen not because he's at all interesting, but because Ariadne judged him Most Likely To Say Yes When Invited Over For A Drink. What he ended up drinking was twenty parts wine to one part something concocted by Yusuf, and the four of them are currently dreaming on Ariadne's tiny living room floor. Yusuf is probably polishing off the wine.

Arthur doesn't feel bad about it. The kid will wake up with a headache in a cab heading back to his own home, and it's not like they're planning to incept him; they just need an entirely naïve subconscious to play host for a while.

"But he does think information belongs in a library," Arthur guesses. Eames nods and sways close to him as Ariadne swings right, turning them in the library's direction, and this time Arthur does feel the gentle pressure as Eames slips the notebook back into his pocket. "Thank you," he says as aridly as possible.

Eames still has the open edge of his jacket held between two fingers. "The sister could still carry on a conversation," he says. "We should try talking to a librarian."

Not in the mood for a prolonged game, nor for the interested acceleration of his own pulse, Arthur takes firm hold of Eames's pickpocketing fingers and returns them to his side of the cart.

"You think they'd have the information?" Ariadne asks. "Or they'd know where to find it?"

"The latter. Unless you feel like going through a whole library's worth of useless data, book by book," Eames says.

Unlike Heather's, this exercise is less about specific information retrieval and more about exposing hidden generalities: opinion, ambition, limits. This because Arthur, who will never again be found wanting when it comes to background research, has taken the liberty of thoroughly expanding his personal dossier on Saito, Saito's main business interests, and the sorts of information Saito is likely to soon be paying them obscene amounts of money to extract and incept. Stepping ahead alone, as a point man must.

Arthur's forte is -- yes, yes -- specificity, but he has a feeling Saito's mind runs on similar lines to Eames's; to Dom's when Dom was at the peak of his creativity and never stopped saying, yes, but what if we _could_? Huge ideas. Implausible demands. Most of Arthur's job is to listen straight-faced and to make things happen; to construct the path from the instability of A to the impossibility of B.

Which is the whole point of this year, of these exercises, of putting up with whatever disapproval is necessary. Arthur loves his job and is fantastic at it and now that they know what they can do, as a group, anything less than pushing at the boundaries of the possible will be boring as all hell.

Arthur is making things happen before the people who will require them to happen have thought of the request. Arthur is assembling a toolbox which he will place in the hands of his best friend.

"Are we being followed?" Eames says.

Arthur snaps around and follows his eyes. Two more security carts are gaining on them. "Oh, come _on_ ," he says. "Ariadne, if you --"

"He's not militarised! There's no way."

No weapons are visible, but the guards in the carts have their eyes fixed on Arthur and one of them is talking into a radio, so whatever the problem is, it's probably going to get bigger.

"Does this guy smoke pot?" Arthur demands of Ariadne.

"What sort of question is that?"

" _Does_ he?"

" _I_ don't know."

"Well, he shouldn't. Ever."

"Sure, okay, we'll make sure to leave a note in his pocket when we wake up. Dear Jeremy, Just Say No." Ariadne blinks and clenches her hands around the steering wheel, and the cart's engine starts to make a far more interesting sound.

"No more changes," Eames says sharply. "They won't be helping."

"Right," Arthur says. "He's latently paranoid. Some people are, it's just one of those things. Cannabis brings it out in their behaviour, sometimes even triggers full-on schizophrenia."

"And their subconscious will be twitchier than usual in response to any intrusion," Eames adds.

"No more changes," Ariadne echoes. "Too late for this one, though," and Arthur's back hits the seat as the engine purrs into outright noise and they accelerate.

Arthur whacks her on the shoulder. "Corner!"

"Shit," she chants, "shit shit shit," and gives a muffled shriek of delight as they swerve around it, narrowly staying on the road. Then she beams at them. "Isn't this fun?"

" _Fun_?" Eames yells.

"You are familiar with the concept?" she says, pokerfaced, and then pushes her foot to the floor just as they pass a sign asking them to slow down, pedestrians about.

"A brain that's both paranoid and asocial," Eames says. "What a charming lad you chose for us to exploit, Ariadne."

"I told you, he's not that bad in person."

"Mm, they're sneaky like that."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Eames," Arthur says.

Ariadne sneaks a look over her shoulder as she pulls onto the road leading towards the fountain in the library's forecourt. "What? I'm missing something."

Arthur sighs and lifts a hand in a sarcastic wave. "You haven't noticed that I'm hardly ever the _subject_ of any dreams?"

Ariadne frowns. "I hadn't, but now that you -- huh. So you're paranoid?"

"His projections are uncommunicative trigger-happy bastards," Eames says fondly. "And he tried pot exactly once in university, and then spent five hours barricading himself in his dorm room."

Arthur drives an outraged elbow into Eames's ribs, because he's never told anyone about that except Elise. "Not so uncommunicative, I take it."

Eames winces, holds his side and shrugs. "The Sweden job. I was bored."

"So you chatted up a projection of my _sister_?"

"I forged you," Eames says, reasonably. "It was the only way she'd say anything."

Arthur is trying to work out if he's flattered or pissed off, when -- "End of the line!" Ariadne shouts, and the cart jerks to a halt outside the library's grand entrance. Her hijinks with the engine have left their pursuers at a good distance, but they dash inside as fast as the revolving doors will let them, and Eames leads the way towards the main circulation desk in that huge room with the crossed stairs. Ariadne's cheeks are flushed and she waves to the projections, who are staring at them in what Arthur would say is half St John's inherent paranoia and half normal surprise at their breathless appearance.

" -- by the lifts? Thank you so much," Eames is already saying by the time they catch up.

"And thank _you_ for being such a flirt," Ariadne says. "Where to now?"

There's a commotion on the far side of the room as the revolving door spits out security guards one by one. The librarian behind the desk frowns.

" _Now_ , we need somewhere to hide," Eames says.

"Storage basement," Ariadne says at once. "Do you --"

Arthur nods, already moving. "I remember. Split up, lose them, meet there."

The goal of the exercise has changed, but Arthur doesn't mind; he's barely worked any jobs where natural paranoia has come to the fore instead of straight-up militarisation, so this is still worthwhile. He smiles to himself as he heads through a door marked _Conservation Office_. His first recruitment officer had been very surprised indeed when a peaceful street full of Arthur's projections turned into an impromptu riot. His Nana Hope had attacked the officer with her Zimmer frame.

His route is tortuous so he's the second one to reach the storage basement, which isn't a true basement because half of it peeks above ground level. Near the ceiling a short, wide window is set into one wall, grabbing at what natural light can be found. Arthur goes to lean against that wall, following Eames's example.

"Learned anything?"

"Everything's bloody cross-referenced." Eames tosses the volume he was reading into a dusty cardboard box. The room's full of these boxes, stuffed haphazardly with what looks like magazines.

"Oh, of course, Heaven forbid you should do any actual research."

Eames glances at him in the slanted shadow and bursts out laughing, which Arthur wasn't expecting. Humour itches in his throat, bubbles in his chest and warms him, and he closes his eyes and lets it spread across his face like sunlight.

Ariadne finds them like that, smiling and sprinkled with settling dust.

"My guards were like glue. I had to hide in the stacks, then use the cargo lift," she says, making a face. She crosses to the wall below the window and wriggles between them so that she's standing with both of her arms linked through theirs, her head tilted back. From somewhere far in the distance comes the sound of carillon bells, pealing out faint harmonies, and Arthur's heart falls into a metronomic pace. He's incredibly happy. Right here and now.

Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

"The job in Sweden," he says. "That was the first time we worked together."

"Yes, and you looked all of sixteen," Eames says. _Buzz cut_ , he mouths down at Ariadne.

"I can't believe you still remember random trivia about my drug habits. I can’t believe you could forge me that well two weeks after we met."

Eames looks at him over the mussed darkness of Ariadne's hair, a look devoid of nonsense, devoid of pride. Arthur's mouth aches absurdly. He actually does think that Eames is a good enough forger to have pulled it off, so he's fishing for -- what, specifically?

"I'd believe it," Ariadne says. Her arm tightens in the crook of his and she glances from one of them to the other with a shining look that Arthur recognises from the first day he met her. It says, _look what I've called into being_.

The vague shape of it is there: Eames forging Ariadne on the tilted floor, their clasped hands and archeological glances, the strata of the critically observed soul, the empty pressure of Arthur's self-preservation; mirrors and mazes and water. Arthur has never wanted a blueprint to something more than he does now. What Ariadne said about love glides upwards in his mind, that she doesn't know how to fit it into her life, and Arthur leans into this dream's replica of his grey Dolce & Gabbana suit and thinks ruefully how true that is of his own life as well.

Nobody's actually said that word, _love_. There's a very good chance it's the wrong word entirely. But here they are, the three of them enveloped in a dream, and it's only logical that Arthur should to do something to preserve the way he feels right now, even if it requires a gamble.

"I'm out of practice," he says abruptly. "At this. All of it."

"That's what this year is for," Eames says. "Training, learning the rules, isn't that right?"

" _No_ ," Arthur bites out, wishing he'd never said anything, "listen --"

"I know what you meant, love," Eames says.

There's a silence and just like that the terrible happiness in Arthur's veins goes cool, which makes no sense, but this _doesn't_ fit into his life and he's trying anyway and that one word spoken in a way that means nothing, like an empty reflex, shivers hopelessly under his skin. He shouldn't have bothered. He's reading too much into this.

"No. You don't know. I know how fucking good you are at your job but you can't know exactly what I think and what I'm feeling --"

Eames leans across and lays a hand across his mouth, firm and businesslike, so much so that Arthur shuts up immediately and looks around for danger.

"Arthur," he says with exasperation.

"You have to _tell_ us," Ariadne says, "that's the point," and then the sound of an explosion tears the air and the ceiling collapses on them.

~

It only takes them a week; he thought it would be longer.

When they woke up from the library Ariadne and Eames exchanged one of their aggravating looks and then everything was normal again, apparently. Arthur's very good at normal. He also refuses to accept anything before he knows what it is, or if it's even being held out in the first place, so wherever the ball is, it's nowhere near his court.

It only takes them a week. If he were to put money on it, Arthur would blame Ariadne, becase Eames might come across as impulsive but he plays the longest cons of anyone Arthur's ever met; given the choice Eames would rather wait a year for the perfect opportunity than settle for anything less.

Though in the end it is Eames who stops him with a hand on his wrist and says, "Second layer?" without explanation.

Arthur looks at the hand until Eames lets him go. "Mine, I assume."

"Fair's fair," Eames says, but it's a bullshit argument and they both know it, because Arthur never asked for any of this.

This would be a good place to back out of the game, Arthur thinks. But Eames is far from being the only one to be afflicted with hazardous levels of curiosity.

"Fine," he says. "This evening."

He can tell it's Eames dreaming the manor house because of the way the paintings on the walls look, though if pressed he wouldn't be able to define why. He does know that Ariadne tends violently towards landscapes and Cubism.

"You don't have to do this," Ariadne says. They're standing in one of the master bedrooms, the lack of comfortable furniture elsewhere having become acutely relevant.

"I know," Arthur says. "But you both did."

They glance at each other at the same moment and Arthur has the mad urge to wave his hand between their heads to see if it's illuminated, or heated, by whatever they've learned to pass between themselves.

"Don't take this the wrong way, darling," Eames says, sending Arthur's figurative hackles sky-high, "but we're a little more prone to wearing our hearts on our comparatively unfashionable sleeves."

"Really?" Arthur says, harsh.

"Lie down," Ariadne says.

"Because whatever the _hell_ you're trying to tell me, you could --"

"Please lie down, Arthur." The five fingertips of her small hand are against his chest, spidery, pushing. Eames is opening the PASIV case on the end of the bed.

Arthur does as she says.

"Who designed it?" he asks, just before they go under the second time.

"It was a joint effort," Ariadne says.

He wants to ask them when they started, but isn't sure he's prepared to hear the answer, so he just nods, and then they're standing in the manor's kitchens and it's far more disconcerting than if they'd ended up on the moon.

Arthur looks around, notetaking internally, before he opens his mouth. It's the same building but the interior is different, and there's a stale smell in the air like attics and sagging wood. Arthur's shirt is creased and the cuffs unbuttoned. He feels unsteady. The material of the manor seems stronger, though, everything thicker and rougher and yet -- decrepit. Abandoned and untouched for long, long stretches of time. He fights to sense the context, the particular hovering motive, that was present in both the twilight carnival and the Zen maze, but all he can feel is the same tug of gut instinct that's led him to countless lockboxes, safes, hollow books and hidden files.

He says, "We have to go upstairs."

A pause; he feels almost foolish. But he's a superb dreamer and this is why he's still alive.

"I told you he could do that," Eames says quietly.

"At least I didn't put money on it this time," Ariadne says. "Yeah. Upstairs."

By the time they've reached the door to what Arthur knows as the highest piano room the feeling has crescendoed into claustrophobia: a whole-body feeling that something's been trapped and wants to get out, and that it won't worry too much about the damage it causes once it does. The door is the strongest and crudest thing in this strong crude edifice, and Arthur could probably find his way here even blindfolded and spun thrice around the points of the compass.

A draft has crept in somewhere, and nearby the curtains puff up and snap briefly taut in a nautical billowing, caught in at the waist by their sashes, then exhale the wind and settle. Arthur takes hold of the door handle; it's loose, poorly fitted, and when Arthur moves it it wriggles around its own screws. The sensation of numb entrapment aches through the metal and into Arthur's mind and for the first time he wonders what Heather hid in that locked drawer, in full confidence that they would never see it. There are so many different sorts of secrets.

He keeps hold of the metal until it warms grudgingly beneath his fingers.

"Arthur," Ariadne says.

Arthur turns to look at her, at Eames, and in this moment realises that he missed a turnoff, somewhere along the way. There was a point when he could have given in to Eames's flirting, and another when he could have asked Ariadne out for a drink, and either of them could have been chalked up as another professional liaison, brief and intense and clean, not requiring any true investment.

The cold draft encircles his bare forearms and ruffles Ariadne's hair, and Arthur puts aside as irrelevant the wish that he could have recognised these early deadlines as they arose. It's far too late for that now, and he's far too entangled, well and truly lost in the larger design that's been erecting itself around him for months, and the architect is standing there with her hand laid against the peeling wallpaper and a careful look on her face.

Arthur wants to resent her for it. He may yet.

"I haven't decided if I'm offended or not," he says.

"If you're not at least a _little_ bit offended, we probably haven't built it right," she says with a hint of a smile.

Neither of them are moving, as though Arthur's an animal who could be easily spooked. If he had to choose something to take offence at, that alone would do, but he is still standing here like an idiot who's forgotten the reason they wanted to enter a room in the first place, and this is much, much worse than staring at his own face in a mirror. He can't promise himself that he wouldn't jump a mile or shoot someone in the throat if startled.

"I think she knows you well enough by now," Eames says, in that deadly-soft tone that's as layered as any dream.

"Perhaps," Arthur says to the door.

The door. It's locked, but Arthur knows a thing or two about locating keys in this house, and besides: it's still a door. He could kick it down, he could shoot out the lock. He feels faintly sick at the thought, as though he's drunk again, as though half a lifetime's defences could be dismantled in a heartbeat and leave only the raw dregs of a person who bears no resemblance to Arthur at all. How do you guard yourself, when the guarding is who you are?

His hand falls to his side and clenches into a convulsive fist which he then has to release again, painfully, finger by finger. With wrenching effort he turns his back on the door.

"I'm not opening it," he says.

"I didn't ask you to," Ariadne says, so beautiful in her fierce poise. "That's not what we're asking for. That's not why we're here."

Arthur bites down on the obvious question because that’s her script, just as this is her design, and it's _his_ fucking skeletons that are being doorknocked here so he has the right of mastery over his own words. If nothing else.

When he's silent, Ariadne's mouth thins with purpose. "The next level down," she says, "this would be a cage."

The paradox in this design is that Ariadne can say things like that, and yet be looking at him with the same caught-back yearning that she directs at Eames when she doesn't think anyone's watching. The yearning seems out of place, here -- Christ, they're in a ruin built around a tightly locked door. At least the top layer was photogenic. No neon lights, no decorative hedges; here they all are in the concrete proof that Arthur is translucent to these people, that they have been watching him and unpicking him and wanting him anyway.

The thought is -- sly, beckoning; the thought is an awareness of water down the hairline fissures of him, chilled into invisible expansion and now thawing to let air breathe upon the veins of shining stone within. Arthur is wearing --

\-- no armour, here, beyond his own skin. His chest seizes.

"I don't know why you involved me in this, why you --" He won't say it, it's too absurd. He doesn't. He gestures around them, instead, at the ceiling and the winter light that spills in through the window. At the labyrinth that Ariadne has glimpsed inside him, built strong to keep things enclosed. "I don't know what you see in this that's so extraordinary."

Eames laughs. Arthur turns and hits him hard across the face before he can even think about rechannelling the desire to do so; he hears Ariadne's indrawn breath but Eames recovers the one-step distance he was forced back, and ends up even closer.

"And you're barely even lying, darling. It's tragic." Eames leans in and gives him a sharp kiss, like a question. There's a thin edge of blood to the taste of him. "Arthur. You spend your life trying your _very_ hardest to be underestimated. And we've decided we're not going to oblige you."

That same heat, that same pinned-down seen-through feeling, trickles through Arthur, but he doesn't even pretend that it's making him angry any more. He just looks at Eames and thinks, as he did with Ariadne in her maze: I want everything that you are. The mischief and the masks and the clever dauntless patience that lies beneath.

"Jesus," Eames whispers, heated, awed.

_It's fucking alarming the way you look at people._

Arthur takes a breath in. And out. And takes control.

"Is that the best you can do, Mr Eames?" he says, and shoves Eames against the locked door and kisses him. The kiss is, very deliberately, not a question. It's a statement.

One of Eames's hands sweeps up through Arthur's hair, mussing it with a surety and swiftness that suggest an action long in the planning. The implications of that pull Arthur further forward, angling his mouth, setting one thigh between Eames's legs and applying pressure. And it's incredible, it's far better than it has any right to be -- no. That's a lie. The truth is that Arthur has always known how good this would be, which is no small reason why he's never done it before. He feels sensitive all over but especially in his fingertips, his wrists, and again he puts aside the possibility of turning this feeling into some controlled action and instead he lets Eames put a thumb at the pulse beneath his jaw and kiss him again, and again, until his mouth is hot and honey-thick with the goodness of it.

"That's not even the half of it, love," Eames says finally, and this time Arthur is rocked into stillness by the terrible weight behind the word. There's teasing and there's truth, and Arthur has never listened for the difference, but now, _now_ he might be starting to hear it.

Something odd must be happening to his face because Eames gives a sigh and steals another kiss, a gentler one. "I'll convince you," he says. "Love, I swear I will. Just give us some time."

Us. Arthur steps back, looks sideways, and still can't bring himself to speak, because Ariadne is standing with one denimed leg crossed tight over the other, one hand arrested halfway through her hair as though she can't remember what she's trying to do. As Arthur watches she exhales, raggedly, taking her time, leaving her lips parted in a way that makes him want to kiss _her_ against walls until she's breathless and wrecked.

" _Fuck_ ," she says, with feeling. "Um. Yeah. You're extraordinary, Arthur, you're -- and if you won't admit it -- well, I guess this is where you have to trust those of us who have a little more imagination than you do."

Arthur has to smile at that. He may not have their flair for creation, but there is plenty of imagination in what he _does_. And despite what Ariadne said in the library he doesn't have to tell them that, if they can't yet see it for themselves. It's comforting to know that nobody understands anyone else completely, not even Eames. There are spaces between the three of them, still, where the mystery dwells.

He only tells them the end of the thought process: "This wouldn't be worth doing if we knew everything already."

"Oh, so we're doing something, are we?" If Eames is aiming for mockery, he misses.

Arthur looks from one of them to the other. Ariadne has one hand clenched around her totem and Eames's split lip is visible as a splinter of flesh, and both of them are showing everything on their faces in a way that makes Arthur feel shaken, broken open and vicariously exposed, and yet -- in a way -- certain. He knows what's being asked of him and what's being offered. It's not going to be clean, it's _not_ going to fall easily under his control, and if all of them are very lucky then it could be amazing.

The risk is high but the benefit is many times higher. And for now he's going to let it be as simple as that.

"Yes," he says. "I think we are."

***

"So," Dom says, as Yusuf tapes the last cannula down against his wrist, "why don't you show me what you've been up to?"

"Where do you want us to start?" Yusuf lies down himself, grinning at Arthur.

Dom turns his head. "I'll let my architect choose."

"Welcome-back party in Eames's mind!" Ariadne cries, pumping her fist towards the ceiling. Yusuf presses the button, and --

"What?" says Dom, and --

"You've missed a few things," says Arthur, as they step backwards to give a fire-twirler some room.

"Arthur-r-r-r!" Ariadne gives a jolted yell, her arms round Eames's neck as he piggybacks her towards them. They screech breathless and glowing to a halt, and Arthur steps closer. Ariadne leans down to kiss his masked forehead, then his mouth, a lingering press of her painted lips. "Come on a gondola ride with us."

"Down, Columbine." Eames slides her off. "It's Cobb's first time, we should show him the sights. Introduce him to my many wonders. Don't make that face, pet, there's no need to be jealous," he adds in Arthur's direction. " _You_ know all my wonders already."

Arthur's face hasn't changed a bit, thank you, but he would like to know what mask he's currently wearing. When he pulls it off he can see that it's a bright one, a skull in swirls of silver paint and sparkling gold against black. He tosses the mask to the ground and watches a pair of green heels crack it almost immediately.

"If you'd call those wonders," he says.

"I would," Ariadne says.

"Thank you." Eames tugs off his own mask and gives Arthur his hall-of-mirrors smile, and Arthur feels his breath pause; feels himself go loose within his clothes.

A showy groan from their left. "You three are becoming insufferable," says Yusuf. "In- _suff_ -er-a-ble. I'm going to find that wine stall."

Dom has acquired a cup of gelato. He anchors the tiny spoon in a berry-coloured scoop and raises his eyebrows at Arthur. "You were right, I have."

"What?"

"Missed a few things."

Eames laughs. "Welcome back to the circus, boss."

As they're walking they pass a blue door, and Arthur thinks fleetingly about a red one set into a maze, and the ancient sturdy wood beseiged by his own secrets. A door to be opened, but not today.

"Come on, Arthur, it's a party. Relax," Ariadne says. She takes his hand and Arthur slows his step to match hers; looks down with a twinge of longing at the gold glitter from his own mask that adorns the riding-hood-red of her lips. "We should go dancing."

"Excellent notion." Eames drapes himself implausibly over both of them at once, his elbow digging into Arthur's neck. "Don’t worry, Arthur, love, nobody's going to insist that you do anything but lead."

They've passed the piazza full of twirling couples once or twice during training, but they've never stopped to dance. Arthur feels clear and heady with the prospect of holding Ariadne's waist and sidestepping her dress, of music and wine, of Eames's talented hands and laughing eyes. Maybe not all of him is convinced yet, but he'll give them time. He'd give them anything.

"I'm in," he says.

**Author's Note:**

> The poem in Yusuf's library is W.H. Auden's 'In Time of War' (a very small section of it). _But ideas can be true although men die / And we can watch a thousand faces / Made active by one lie._
> 
> The significance of the Lorem Ipsum variant can be found [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum#English_translation).
> 
> Ariadne doesn’t know it, but she stole a lot of interior design from the [State Library of NSW](http://www.flickr.com/photos/state-records-nsw/2715907218/). Some unscrupulous person must have made her think it was all her own idea.


End file.
